


This Might As Well Happen

by skoosiepants



Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Aliens Made Them Do It, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Stargate Atlantis Fusion, M/M, Mpreg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-23 02:29:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23004298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skoosiepants/pseuds/skoosiepants
Summary: Steve's on an off-world team with three people who are infinitely smarter than him--a marine tech, a whosawhatsit engineer, and a xenobiologist with a bad attitude and a lamentable inability to keep it in his pants.He doesn’t know if whatever he’s doing here means anything, or is worth the high likelihood of getting all his good years sucked out of him by space vampires, but, honestly, there was never going to be any normal for him, anyway.or -That time Steve accidentally gets knocked up by Billy... IN SPACE!
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington
Comments: 47
Kudos: 719





	This Might As Well Happen

**Author's Note:**

> guys, I truly don't know. I started off writing an SGA team fic with ritual sex and I was halfway through the scene when I realized I had to do mpreg. I told @lissadiane and she said, "Oh no," and then read it and _agreed._ So here we are. Here. We. Are.
> 
> TWs you might want to consider:  
> \- it could be construed as dub-con, as that comes hand-in-hand with Aliens Made Them Do It.  
> \- there is brief talk of abortion, and also talk of losing the baby (he doesn't lose the baby. this is not that kind of fic, but it does come early).
> 
> All science is hand-wavy, as, you know, mpregs tend to be. Greatest of thank yous to @lissadiane, as always. Forgive any mistakes I may have missed; this is pure ridiculous fun, and probably could've been both longer and shorter than this. Please enjoy.

The Pegasus Galaxy clownshow is not the weirdest shit Steve’s ever been involved in. The city is _cool,_ and the Wraith are formidable, but Steve grew up in Indiana. There’s a ton of government crap he’s not allowed to talk about still giving him nightmares. Comparatively, Atlantis is a cakewalk.

Dinosaur planet? Awesome. Crow people? Bring it. Semi-intelligent furry octopus? Steve doesn’t even miss a step in the hallways when it undulates past.

He’s on an off-world team with three people who are infinitely smarter than him--a marine tech, a whosawhatsit engineer, and a xenobiologist with a bad attitude and a lamentable inability to keep it in his pants.

He doesn’t know if whatever he’s doing here means anything, or is worth the high likelihood of getting all his good years sucked out of him by space vampires, but, honestly, there was never going to be any normal for him, anyway.

*

As team leader, Steve tends to get the worst of it.

He _voluntarily_ gets the worst of it, because it’s not like he’s going to let Dustin get hurt if he can help it--Dustin’s got the spatial awareness of a rock when he has a datapad in his hands--and Hargrove’s a stubborn asshole that can, unfortunately, totally take Steve in a fight. He’s a biologist. He doesn’t have to go that hard. And yet.

Corporal Buckley’s a whole other story, of course, but mainly because Steve and Robin, together, have a hard time not stepping directly into shit.

Which makes his current predicament more than a little...odd.

They’re in a roughly twenty by twenty room, solid rock walls, no windows. Other than that, though, it’s a pleasantly opulent bedroom--big fluffy bed, slippery sheets, a low slung couch, a small, ornate table with something wet, hot and sweet smelling sitting on it in a pot.

Hargrove’s leaning his back against the wall near the locked door, arms crossed over his chest. He looks particularly belligerent, for being the main reason they’re in this mess to begin with.

Or, at least, in this mess together.

Apparently, forest gods on this planet are fickle, and the tiny village is running out of unbonded pairs. This could easily have been resolved by Robin’s spectacular fake moaning and some banging on the walls, though, and it’s not like any fertility rites would work on Hargrove or Steve, either.

No, all this does is make things even more awkward, in a sea of awkward that seems to have been rising ever since Hargrove beat the crap out of him for accidentally marrying Max. He’s pretty sure the only reason he got out of that situation alive, when Hargrove jumped him in the dark corridor outside of the xenobiology lab, is that Steve had the good sense to cover his face and shout that he was ninety percent certain he was gay.

He’s actually a hundred percent bi, but he’ll save that revelation for when Max and him are officially divorced. Apparently they just have to give the goat-thing back to the elder on PX3-505, but odds are nothing mission related is gonna take them back there until the next warm season harvest. In three years. He’s banking on Hargrove forgetting all about it well before then.

When Hargrove remains mulishly silent, glaring, Steve flops down on the sofa with a sigh. He says, “We’re gonna have to at least try to be convincing.” Odds are he won’t get the giggles, like last time, because Robin is _shameless,_ so they’ve got that going for them.

Hargrove loosens his arms and straightens, quirking an eyebrow. He says, “I think I can handle sex, Harrington,” and Steve’s mind whites out for a long, slow moment.

He’s pretty sure he’s blinking too much. Hargrove. Sex. He thinks _oh no_ and also _yes please_ and he has no idea how to actually handle this.

“Uh.”

Hargrove quirks his eyebrow even higher.

Steve’s throat is dry. On the one hand, Hargrove’s ornery and mean as shit, and hates his guts on good days. On the other, he could probably hold Steve down with one hand, and Steve’s seen his dick in the showers. God.

Reaching for the pot in the middle of the table, Steve pours himself a generous helping of what he truly hopes is alcohol, but it goes down a little too easily for that. It tastes like syrup, but is also remarkably refreshing, and he immediately refills his glass after he’s emptied it.

He cups the glass between shaking fingers and stares down at the pale wood grain of the table. Sex. With Hargrove.

It’s not like Steve’s never had _moments,_ when Hargrove’s laughing at something Robin’s said, or trying to freak Dustin out with local fauna, or playing card games with fascinated natives--Hargrove can be occasionally genuine, is what it is, and it makes him seem like a totally different person. So Steve could definitely do this, but then he’d probably feel bad about himself afterwards. Ugh.

He’s just not sure how to tell Hargrove that.

Taking a deep breath, he says, “You know, uh. Robin and I…” and drifts off helplessly, looking up as Hargrove moves to stand in front of him.

Hargrove’s grinning. It’s not quite his big, mocking ‘charming the natives’ grin, but it’s _close._ Bastard.

Something twists in his chest. He wants to say _fuck you_ and he wants to punch Hargrove in the face and he wants to drink more of this delicious punch crap, but his throat is tingling and his tongue feels thick and it takes a few tries for him to rasp out, “I feel weird,” instead.

“You’re probably drunk on space wine,” Hargrove says, picking up his cup and sniffing it cautiously.

“Maybe.” It doesn’t feel like he’s drunk.

Hargrove carefully sets the cup to the side, though, eyeing him cautiously, and Steve doesn’t bother reaching for it again.

Steve feels hot. There’s sweat dripping down the line of his spine so fast and sudden that he doesn’t remember _not_ being hot and sweaty, and it should be gross, but all Steve can think about is maybe he should get naked.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Hargrove says, hands held up as he stumbles back a step from where Steve is busy trying to fight his way out of his shirt. “You know I was joking about the sex, right?”

It’s _a million degrees_ in this stone fortress of a room, there isn’t even a fucking breeze, and Steve feels claustrophobic and also too big for his skin; he doesn’t realize he’s scratching at his arms until Hargrove grabs his wrists and leans a knee onto the top of Steve’s thigh to keep him still.

“What the fuck, Harrington?” Hargrove says. His voice is a growl that sends a shiver up Steve’s back and he’s suddenly acutely aware that he’s hard.

“Oh shit,” Steve rasps. He tries to squirm out from under Hargrove, but Hargrove’s fingers tighten around his hands. He groans and says, “Fuck,” and maybe he’d be more embarrassed if it didn’t feel like he’s going to die.

“This is going to sound really bad,” he says, voice so low that Hargrove’s _worryingly concerned_ face has to get closer, “but I think you need to fuck me.”

Hargrove’s eyes go wide, but his mouth twists up into a sneer. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

He’s _right,_ this is crazy and wrong; it’s inappropriate, it’s gonna get him court-marshalled, but he’s so hard it hurts, and something low in his belly is spangling, like he could rub one out with just the rough scrape of his uniform pants, and something tells him it’s not going to just stop with that.

“Okay,” Steve says hoarsely. He needs Hargrove to back off, but he can’t make his mouth say it. His eyes are itchy with tears. It feels like it’s been hours, but he’s pretty sure it’s only been a few minutes. He’s _fucked._

It doesn’t help that Hargrove’s pretty, and is routinely obsessed with sticking things in his mouth, and that he’s cocking his head at Steve curiously, like he’s over his initial shock and is _thinking about it._ He can’t be thinking about it.

His gaze flick to Steve’s crotch and back up to his face, and his eyes narrow, and his sneer turns into a smirk, and this is so bad on so many levels. Steve’s supposed to be in charge. Steve’s lost control of this entire situation.

“No,” Steve says.

“Do you _really_ mean that?” Hargrove says, grin filthy.

Only about ten percent of Steve really means that. But it absolutely doesn’t help that he’s pretty sure Hargrove is just fucking with him.

No matter what Steve thinks or wants, Hargrove’s going to tease him about it mercilessly and then hold it over his head until the end of time.

Steve squeezes his eyes shut and tips his head back against the couch, curling his hands into fists so the muscles in his forearms clench and relax under the still steady hold Hargrove has on him.

With his eyes closed, he can feel his heart beating in the palms of his hands, down his thighs, all the way up his throat, blood roaring in his ears. He grits his teeth and bites back a sob.

When Hargrove’s grip loosens, then falls away, Steve heaves an unsteady breath but lets his hands drop to his lap. He startles, briefly, at a touch on his cheek--all his muscles freeze up, he refuses to open his eyes.

Hargrove says, “So. Sex juice.”

“This isn’t funny,” Steve says.

“It’s a little funny,” Hargrove says, and Steve can sense him hovering closer, feels the couch dip down next to his legs and a warm body tuck up close to his sides.

Steve blinks and looks, finally, and Hargrove’s braced over him, arms bracketing his head.

He says, “You know, if you wanted into my pants so bad, Harrington, all you had to do was ask.”

“I hate you,” Steve says, but his hands come up, twisting into the front of Hargrove’s undershirt, tugging him closer. “God, I hate you _so much.”_

“Sure,” Hargrove says, his grin softening, and it actually doesn’t matter, because Hargrove’s touching his cheek and Steve’s dying, and he’ll worry about how this is probably going to ruin his life later.

*

Everything under Steve’s skin burns so bad it almost feels cold.

Hargrove pushes on his wrists, gathering them in one hand over Steve’s head. He holds onto his hip with the other, says, “Jesus, stay still for me, princess,” with this blatant _mocking joy_ that makes Steve want to knee him in the balls--he doesn’t, but only because he really needs Hargrove to fuck him.

He’s so hard it hurts, and when Hargrove lets go of his hands to slither downward, his back arches so high he feels like it might break, like his heart might pound right out of his chest, and then every single cell in his body seems to explode when Hargrove gets his mouth on him. His cock so hot and angry with blood that Hargrove’s mouth is _soothing._ It doesn’t even actually feel like an orgasm, there’s no relief even as Hargrove swallows around him; it just feels like he’s building up to something more.

Hargrove licks a stripe up the underside of his still-hard dick and then something wet teases his ass. Steve gropes the bed covers, tugs them up to scream into, to bite--he’s never felt _this horrible_ before during sex, like he’s so sensitive he has to choke on words telling Hargrove to back off.

Fingers are sliding into him and he moves his legs restlessly up Hargrove’s shoulders, kicks at his back and loosens his jaw enough to bite out, hoarsely, _“Now.”_

“Hang on, pretty boy,” Hargrove says, mouthing softly at the inside of Steve’s thigh as he twists his fingers, makes Steve’s back tighten up again.

Steve lets out a sob before he can stuff the blanket back into his mouth, voice mangled on, “Now, _please.”_

Hargrove mouths his way back up his body, little brands of hot fire, and Steve figures he’s a snotty mess, feels tears drip down from the corners of his eyes as he pants and says, “Please,” and, “No,” and, “Yes.”

And then Hargrove’s lips are open high on his cheek. He’s saying, “Shhhhh,” and, “It’s all right, I’ve got you,” and the slide in makes Steve’s breath hitch and roll like he’s on the edge of hyperventilating.

It feels too big and also not enough, and then Hargrove kisses him.

*

When Steve wakes up, it’s impossible to tell how much time has passed. His body aches in ways that say _a lot,_ and he’s almost too tired to be embarrassed about it. The room’s lights are dim, but not completely dark. A heavy arm is tucked over him, warm body lined up all along his back, legs, the bend of his knees. He’s being _spooned._ Aggressively. The arm around him tightens and pulls him even further back.

“What do we say?” Hargrove’s voice is a deep, sleepy rasp along his hairline.

Steve has a headache and his insides hurt and his ass is sore and Hargrove slides the flat of his hand down low on his belly, lower, with a harsh chuckle and a, “Steve?”

Oh god.

It _hurts_ to get hard. Hargrove’s fingers wrap gently around the base of his dick, coaxing it out of him anyhow.

And then Hargrove says, falsetto, “Thanks, Billy, for fucking the sex juice out of me!” and Steve sucks in a breath, smacks his hands away and says, _“Fuck you.”_

Hargrove laughs, lets Steve push him away easily. He stretches his arms over his head, sheets riding low across his hips, as Steve rolls over to glare at him.

“Relax, Harrington,” Hargrove says, still grinning smugly, eyes half closed. He looks like a sleepy, well-fed lion, Steve thinks, messy blond curls haloed out around his head. “Aren’t you glad you weren’t stuck in here with Buckley?”

Steve’s fairly certain this wouldn’t have even happened if he’d been in there with Robin, but he doesn’t actually want to talk about it.

Hiding a grimace, he manages to get upright on the bed. He’s sticky with sweat and semen and some oil that smells like black tea. He needs a shower. He needs to be back on Atlantis, and he needs to figure out how to write up a report that doesn’t include _sex juice,_ and getting fucked so good he blacked out. Jesus.

The thing is, they have _seminars_ about this. They have crash courses on respecting native flora and fauna, and what to do if you’re accidentally drugged. If you’re being held at spear point. If you’re locked in an underground bunker by renegade genii. If you’re getting eaten by a wraith. There was a course on losing inhibitions that Steve is fairly sure, now that he thinks about it, was about getting stir-crazy drunk and sleeping with your teammates. Nothing was said about awkward morning afters, though, or what to do if your teammate smugly struts around naked while your stomach cramps up from nerves.

Luckily, Steve doesn’t have much time to dwell on it. He finishes tugging on his clothes just as the single door opens, admitting a passel of delighted villagers who usher them out of the building and out into the too-sunny day.

He ignores Robin’s waggling eyebrows and rolls his shoulders, slipping on a pair of sunglasses, running a hand through his hair to hide the way his fingers shake.

This is going to be _fine._

*

_This is not going to be fine,_ Steve thinks, dry heaving into his toilet, spitting up bile after he’s lost pretty much everything he ate the night before. His throat is on fire. He wants to die. He’s not sure if this some sort of extended sex juice hangover, or if there’s something seriously wrong, but this is the third day in a row he’s woken up and barely made it into the bathroom.

It’s been over a month. Signs are pointing toward ‘definitely wrong.’

Steve’s been on Atlantis for over a year. He’s seen people melt from the inside out. They had a quarantine in sector 4.1 just last week that involved _lung slugs._ Just because Biro cleared him during his last post-mission physical doesn’t mean he isn’t still dying.

“I’m dying,” he groans.

“Don’t be such a baby,” Robin says, but she wipes his forehead with a cool cloth, so he knows she actually loves him.

Steve leans back against the cool glass wall of the shower stall and says, “Do you think I was poisoned by sex juice?”

“First of all,” Robin lifts a finger, “never say sex juice again. Second of all, we’ve been on three missions since you boned Hargrove, you could be dying from literally anything.”

Steve covers his face with his hands, rubs his palms into his eyes. “I hate you.”

“That last planet had bugs the size of my face, think about it.” Robin sounds way too cheery about Steve’s pain, but he’s concentrating too hard on not throwing up again to care.

Eventually, Robin sighs heavily, like he’s seriously inconveniencing her, then hooks a hand around his arm and starts tugging him to his feet. She’s surprisingly gentle, for the annoyed squint to her face, and he’s lightheaded and sweaty and determined to swallow down his bile and crawl back into bed.

She says, “Nope, no,” when he lists toward that direction, though. “Infirmary. Come on.”

“But _bed,”_ Steve says, making grabby hands. He’s tired. He has nothing left in his system. He needs to sleep for ten more hours and then maybe choke down a few peanut butter crackers.

“You can go back to bed after we figure out if you have the space flu, and if it’s contagious.” Robin’s too close to him to be really concerned about contagion--she has her arm wrapped around his waist, which he’s grateful for, because his feet feel numb. He’s hoping it’s just because he was crouched in the bathroom for so long, and not because he’s contracted a degenerative space disease.

In the infirmary, Biro says, “You haven’t contracted a degenerative space disease,” but she’s frowning at her scanner in a not entirely encouraging way.

“I, uh,” she looks from Steve to her scanner and then back again, a little furrow in between her eyebrows. “I need to consult with Dr. Carson.” She pats his arm. “Hang tight.”

“I can’t believe I’m going to die of sex juice,” Steve says, trying for funny and falling entirely flat.

Robin has her eyes focused on the monitor over his head. It’s supposed to show his vitals everywhere Biro stuck a round node--his temple, his neck, the inside of his forearm, over his heart, to the left of his abdomen. She says, “What’s that?” pointing.

“What’s what?” Steve twists around and tilts his head. It’s a bad angle, but he can kind of make out five wriggling lines doing... things. The fourth one down’s his heart, he can feel it thump in time with the spikes. The fifth line down has much smaller spikes, pinging at much faster speeds. Huh.

“Space parasite?” Steve says, only half joking. Oh god, what if he has worms?

“So,” Biro says, coming around the curtain again with a wide plastic smile, “I’m just going to have to redo a few tests.”

“Why?” Robin says, crossing her arms over her chest. “Does it have anything to do with that second heartbeat?”

“Second _what?”_ Steve says, just as Biro winces and says, “That’s… unfortunate.”

“Oh fuck,” Steve says, clutching the edges of the cot he’s on with enough force to make the metal groan. “This is gonna be like Alien, right? Oh my god, I can’t believe this is gonna be like _Alien.”_

Robin says, “What’s going on, doc?” and technically Biro shouldn’t be telling her anything, but _technically_ Steve’s probably only hours away from having his chest cavity ripped open, so he doesn’t actually care.

Biro’s plastic smile becomes a little more genuine around the edges, something Steve would appreciate if he could stop panicking. “Congratulations, Sergeant,” she says. “You’re having a baby.”

*

They roll in an ultrasound that shows Steve absolutely nothing except apparently he’s grown some kind of magical womb. Biro sticks him with a bunch of needles for more tests, vitamin boosters, and something to help with nausea--Steve sits through it all in a kind of numb fog.

Robin says, “So what are you going to tell your wife?”

“Oh, fuck you,” Steve says, and straightens up from his slouch when he realizes he’s been cradling his belly. “No one is telling anyone anything.”

Robin arches an eyebrow.

Steve slumps again, rubbing his palms up and down the tops of his thighs. “No one is telling anyone anything _yet,”_ he amends. If Dustin finds out, the whole city will know within hours, and Steve would rather Hargrove not find out about this from anyone but him. 

Biro snaps off her gloves and says, “Okay, you’re free to go. I need you here daily for right now, though. Every evening this week, and then we’ll discuss a more lax schedule once we’ve got your baseline. And I’m taking you off off-world rotation--”

“What? No, you can’t--”

“And,” Biro raises a single, scolding finger and waits for Steve to settle down, “I want you to promise you’ll tell me the second anything ever feels wrong. Got it?”

Steve wants to complain, but Biro’s fierce and Robin doesn’t look like she’s gonna back him up--she’s stuffed her pockets with extra vitamins and nodded along with tea suggestions--so Steve just swallows hard and says, “Yes.”

“Good.” She pats his leg. “Do you have any questions? I’m not entirely sure I can answer them yet, but we’re going to figure this out.”

Steve has lots of questions, beginning with _how does he have the right parts for this?_ And ending with _how the fuck is this thing going to come out?_ But he honestly isn’t sure he wants to know, even if Biro could tell him.

“This is amazing,” Biro says, finally fluttering past her initial visible disbelief and horror, delving into _alien science is so cool_ with wide, fascinated eyes. She’s grinning brightly by the time she flicks the curtain back around his bed and leaves them alone for Steve to get dressed.

Her enthusiasm is infectious, or maybe Steve’s just tired of being scared.

He’s going to have a baby.

He’s going to have a baby with _Hargrove._

Hargrove has the personality of a slutty, bad-tempered weasel. Steve doesn’t even know if he likes kids, if he ever thought of having them one day. Max has told him how fucked up their home life was, growing up--he doesn’t know if Hargrove is going to want anything to do with this, and that makes him… kind of sad. Shit.

“Are you crying?” Robin says.

“No,” Steve says, swiping at his cheeks. Hormones are stupid. He tries to get up from the cot but Robin wraps her arms around his head and presses his forehead into her neck.

“Oh my sweet, stupid, pregger dweeb.” She adds, more softly, “Do you know what you’re going to do about it?”

Steve sniffs and rubs snot on Robin’s collar because she’s an asshole. “Do about what?”

Robin leans back, tugs at Steve’s hair so she’s looking into his face. “You’re gestating an assbaby, Steve. I mean, it’s obvious Biro _assumed,_ but you really don’t have to go through with this if you don’t want to.”

Steve blinks still-watery eyes. He says, “Never call it an assbaby again,” and also, “I don’t know, this’s kind of a once in a lifetime thing, right?” Steve might feel different about it tomorrow when he’s puking up his guts again, but it _is_ kind of cool.

Robin throws up her hands. “Oh my god, you can’t just decide to keep it _for science._ You’re in the military!”

“So are you,” Steve says, scowling.

“What’s that got to do with--”

“You could have a kid, why can’t I?” He scowls harder, digging in.

“Oh god, we are _not_ getting belligerent about this, Steve. It’s totally different! You’re a dude! We don’t even know how your… womb… thingy…” she waves her arms around, “works.”

“If you stick around here any longer I’m gonna assume you want more needles,” Biro suddenly says, peeking around the curtain.

“I’m going.” Steve gingerly gets up from the cot, thinks if he feels any different. If he can feel anything yet, now that he knows.

He feels the same as he did sitting still--sort of light headed, _hungry,_ mad at Robin.

Robin sighs. “Come on,” she says, “let’s get you some breakfast.”

*

On the official mission report, Steve had written, “Deescalation through harmless ritual,” and he’d certainly hoped Hargrove had put something similar. They never actually talked about it, because Steve can occasionally be a coward.

He’s trying not to be a coward now, staring down a pissed off Hargrove at 21:00, city time, standing in his doorway in just his pj pants and a t-shirt.

“Why the fuck are we grounded, Harrington? What did you do?” Hargrove says, heaving his breath like a dragon--Hargrove isn’t technically taller than him, but the breadth of his shoulders always makes him seem like it, anyhow.

Steve says, “It’s just temporary,” instead of ‘I’m pregnant,’ because Hargrove doesn’t look like he’s in the mood to believe him.

It’s stupid, Hargrove’s a xenobiologist, he _likes_ living things. This is just one more living thing, albeit in a weird place.

“Is this about the sex ritual?” Hargrove says, looming closer.

Steve takes an involuntary step back and says, “Fertility.”

Hargrove’s jaw softens minutely. “What?”

“It was a fertility ritual,” Steve says, and he stares into Hargrove’s face and wills him to understand.

Hargrove rolls his eyes. “Whatever. We fucked. And you, what, cried all over Sheppard about it? Are we being _disciplined?”_

Steve hadn’t written anything in the report, yeah, and there’s no one but Robin that knows right now that the baby’s _Hargrove’s,_ but he has no doubt that Biro at least filled Sheppard in on the knocked up portion. He could probably extrapolate the truth, if he really thought about it, but that’s generally not Sheppard’s style.

Steve crosses his arms and says, “What do you want, Hargrove? There’s nothing I can do about being grounded.” Eventually, because they can’t wait the nine fucking months it’s going to take, Hargrove and Robin and Dustin are all going to be reassigned to different teams, but Steve isn’t going to mention that right now. He just repeats, “It’s temporary,” and hopes Hargrove doesn’t take a swing at him. Again.

He doesn’t know if he sounds as tired as he feels, but Hargrove suddenly deflates a little, frowning. He glances Steve up and down and says, “Are you sick?”

Steve makes a face. “Kind of.”

Hargrove _hmmms,_ eyes him curiously. “Contagious?”

“Uh.” Steve feels only slightly taken aback and, frankly, a little weirded out by the abrupt change of tone. “No?”

Hargrove looks suspicious, but doesn’t call him on it. He just whirls around and stalks off down the hall, and Steve hangs out of the doorway and says, “Yeah, goodnight to you too, asshole.”

Hargrove flips him off without turning around.

*

Dustin says, “You’re drinking tea. Why are you drinking tea, Steve?”

Steve doesn’t want to say ‘because it makes my insides not feel like becoming outsides.’ Dustin would get way too concerned. He’s hunched low in his seat, and can feel Hargrove’s scowling gaze on him from across the mess. He’s not up to dealing with any of this. It’s been a week since the _big reveal,_ and his morning sickness hasn’t let up at all. Biro treats him like a science project and a pin cushion. Sheppard’s stopped him twice in the hallway to grimace at him silently. It’s the worst.

He’s pretty sure everyone thinks he has the space flu. Someone keeps leaving him soup outside his door to find when he’s done with his afternoon nap.

And he takes _naps_ now, and he’d be happier about that if he wasn’t growing another human being in his magical womb.

Dustin says, “There’s something going on. You’re hiding something from me.”

“There’s nothing going on,” Steve says, and feels immediately terrible about lying to him.

“Steve.” Dustin has puppy dog eyes, it’s totally unfair.

“I just like tea now,” Steve says.

“You don’t like tea. You especially don’t like _that_ tea.” He jabs a spoon at him. “You make a face every time you take a sip.” 

“I don’t.” Steve takes a sip and very carefully does not make a face.

“Do!” Dustin narrows his eyes. “McKay says I’m being put on another off-world team. Without you.”

Ah, the heart of the matter--Dustin thinks he kicked him off the team. “Dustin--”

“Don’t give me that it’s not you it’s me bullshit,” Dustin says, waving his hands around. “Come on. I can take it.”

Steve rubs a hand over his eyes. He wasn’t hungry a second ago, but now he really wants pancakes. And he really hates this fucking tea. “It’s really _not_ you.”

Dustin scoffs.

Steve loves Dustin like a younger brother. Being on an off-world team with him has been hard. Dustin knows he wasn’t his first choice, but he also knows why: Steve’s desire to keep him out of trouble. The only reason he’d finally agreed to take him in the first place was because McKay was going to put him on a team anyway, and Steve figured it would be easier to keep an eye on him up close. So no, Steve absolutely does not want Dustin on another team, but there’s nothing he can do about it now.

“There’s a reason,” Steve says, and ignores Dustin’s, “Aha!”

Steve says, “I can’t tell you yet.”

“You can’t. Yet.” Dustin doesn’t look totally mollified, but he almost looks more intrigued than hurt.

And Steve isn’t going to say a word until he’s built up enough courage to tell Hargrove, and god knows how long that’s going to take.

Hargrove certainly isn’t making it easy on him, glaring at him from corners, shoulder checking him in hallways, cornering him coming out of the gym showers, once, and just snapping his teeth in his face like an animal. Hargrove is crazy, but that doesn’t mean Steve can just keep this from him. Even if he wasn’t, at some point, going to become _visibly pregnant._ Jesus.

“Look,” Steve finally says. “It’s not just you, okay? Hargrove and Buckley are moving teams, too. I’m the only one that’s officially grounded.”

“And you’ll tell me why,” Dustin says.

Steve nods. “Soon.”

“Soon.” Dustin shoves a forkful of pancakes in his mouth, mumbles out, “Very soon.”

“Sure,” Steve says, and frowns as Hargrove struts past their table, the newest xenobiologist--tall, lovely Dr. Clara Roberts, who has a charming smile and ample bosom--on his arm. Steve is totally not jealous, and Hargrove can shove the rakish wink he tosses Steve over his shoulder up his very fine ass.

*

Steve’s duties have dwindled down to stock-checking and playing Go Fish with Will, but he thinks it’s mainly because Sheppard doesn’t want to deal with the reality of a dude having a baby.

“Max says you’re avoiding El,” Will says.

El’s a psychic space princess, Steve has definitely been avoiding her.

Will’s tiny office is full of dusty unused Ancient equipment, a battered laptop with stickers all over it, and piles of handwritten notebooks. Will has an extensive collection of superhero figurines and the pale complexion of someone who spends ninety percent of their day in a room with no windows.

“You know, you’d find more exciting anthropological finds if you went on a couple off-world jaunts, Byers,” Steve says. “Have any tens?”

“Go fish,” Will says. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“What question?” Steve feels like he’s running around in circles some days. Everyone is too nosy for their own good.

“ _Why_ are you avoiding El?” Will has big eyes, an elven face and an unfortunate haircut. It makes him look too young.

Steve sighs heavily. “El doesn’t keep secrets, Will.” El doesn’t like secrets. El thinks secrets are the greatest evil in the galaxy, the wraith aside--she carries a lot of guilt around still, for being a Runner, even though Steve thinks her space princess abilities did far more good for people than harm.

“Is the secret that you’re dying? Because I’m not so sure that’s a secret.” Will’s voice wavers at the end, lip quivering, and Steve’s torn between rolling his eyes and pulling him into a hug, and apparently being pregnant makes you want to cry about stupid shit every other minute.

“I’m not dying,” Steve says. He adds, “I promise,” when Will doesn’t look convinced.

And the thing is, Will’s trustworthy and quiet, he’d tell Will in a heartbeat if he didn’t know Will hangs out with El, and El has no filter or tact, _especially_ when she’s surprised. It’s endearing, mostly, but is also extremely inconvenient.

This is just going to get messy. Messier. He needs to come up with a plan.

*

At six weeks, the ultrasound shows a speck in a blob, from what Steve can tell. He’s unimpressed. They can barely hear a heartbeat, even though the monitor keeps spiking steadily in time.

And then he notices Biro’s frown and his chest tightens and he says, “What? What’s wrong?” with more fear in his heart than he thought possible.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Biro says, but she says it too slowly. “It’s just… this is our first real comparison of what’s actually going on.”

Robin squeezes his hand. “And?”

“Well,” Biro looks apologetic, and Steve automatically starts to tear up, he can’t even help it, “I’m not sure how long it’ll be viable.”

Robin squeezes his hand _harder._ “What does that mean?”

“We’ll have to test again in a week. There is absolutely no cause for alarm yet--”

“What does that _mean?”_ Robin says again, because Steve’s throat seems to have stopped working.

Biro presses her lips together. She stares at them both, and then presses the wand to Steve’s belly again. She says, “See here?” using a finger to follow the curve of the blob on the screen. “There’s a smaller ratio of womb to embryo than there was two weeks ago. The embryo has been growing, but the womb has _also_ been shrinking.”

Steve rasps, _“What?”_

Biro gently lifts the wand away again. She starts to wipe gel off his stomach until he pushes her hands away, impatient, and says, “It’s shrinking? Like gonna _disappear_ kind of shrinking?”

“It’s nothing significant yet,” Biro says, trying and absolutely failing at being reassuring. She brings up his chart on her laptop, sets the images side by side--something eases in Steve’s chest when he can’t tell the difference.

“They look the same,” Robin says.

Biro nods. “It’s very slight. But still concerning, especially since a woman’s uterus _expands_ during pregnancy.”

“But I’m not a woman,” Steve says woodenly.

“No, you’re not,” Biro says. “And we have no idea what kind of alien physiology this was actually made for.”

“I’m.” Steve’s mouth opens and closes dumbly. Then he lets out a harsh laugh, covers his face with his hands. “God. It’s a good thing I never told Hargrove, right?”

“Steve,” Robin says.

Steve shakes his head, swipes tears off his cheeks, even though he can’t seem to stop them from falling. “How long till we’ll know for sure?”

“We’re finding new Ancient tech every day. I refuse to think they wouldn’t have a contingency plan for premature--”

“How long?” Robin says.

With a sigh, Biro says, “If you can make it to twenty-two weeks, there’s a chance it’ll be okay. Right now,” she holds up her hand, “you’re about the size of a fist, which is normal. You shrink a centimeter every two weeks, you’ve theoretically got sixteen more weeks of having a uterus, before it disappears.”

“But it has to stretch,” Steve says, feeling even more numb now than he did when this whole debacle started two weeks ago.

Biro tugs on the ends of her lab coat and says, “We should have an incubation plan ready. That is, if you really want to try and keep it.”

Steve feels overwhelmed and drained, but he says, “I really want to try and keep it.”

“You know,” Robin says, when Biro’s gone--murmuring to herself about the infirmary databases and healing pods--and Steve’s tugging his shirt down, limbs jerking unsteadily, “it’s really not a good thing that you didn’t tell Hargrove. Right? You know that?”

“Sure.”

“ _Steve._ He’s an asshole, but he’s not that kind of an asshole.” Robin cups his face between her hands, makes him look directly at her. “It’s okay to need some support right now.”

“I have you.”

“Duh.” She rolls her eyes. “But if you tell Hargrove you’ll _also_ have Dustin and Max and Will. Hell, Eleven will probably dote on you. Get ready for more Eggos than you’ve ever wanted in your entire life.”

Steve snorts, rubs the back of his hand under his nose. “Okay,” he says.

She grins at him. “Okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, slipping off the cot and getting to his feet. “Let’s go find Hargrove and tell him he’s going to be a dad.”

*

The closer they get to Hargrove’s quarters, the more Steve feels like dying. He can’t do this. How is he supposed to do this? Is Hargrove even going to believe him? If anyone came up to _him_ with this info, he’d laugh in their face. Hargrove’s more likely to punch him, and isn’t that bad for the baby?

There are so many good reasons not to actually do this.

“You’re chickening out,” Robin says when he slows down to a stop in the middle of the hallway.

“I’m not chickening out.” He’s just… reevaluating.

Robin folds her arms over her chest, unimpressed. “You’re chickening out.”

Steve narrows his eyes at her.

She arches her eyebrows.

He says, “Fine. But if he punches me, it’s on you.”

“He’s not going to punch you,” Robin says brightly, falling in step with him as he starts walking again. “He might slam the door in your face, but he’s not going to punch you. Max threatened his balls, last time, I’m pretty sure he’s scared shitless of her.”

Max can be scary, Steve sympathizes.

“I should probably do this alone,” he says. He appreciates the support, but every time he imagines telling Hargrove he’s pregnant, all he can picture is some kind of embarrassing scene. He loves Robin, but the less material she has to make fun of him the better.

“Look,” Robin says, placing a hand on his arm to stop him again. “I know we’re, like, joking here? But I know this is tough. I know that we’re not even sure this sprog is going to make it--”

Steve’s been ignoring the burn at the bottom of his throat, the heaviness in his chest, and he has to blink rapidly to stop his eyes from welling up.

“--and you know that if Hargrove does _anything_ shitty to you for this, I’ve got your back, okay?”

“Yeah, sure,” Steve says hoarsely.

“I’m not kidding,” Robin says, a hint of a smile pulling at her mouth. “I think I can take him.”

Steve shakes his head with a laugh. And then he straightens his spine, tugs his shirt down, and presses both his hands to his belly for good luck.

*

“We need to talk,” Steve says when Hargrove opens the door.

Hargrove, shirtless, in boxer briefs, lounges along the doorframe like a large cat. “Can it wait?” he says, licking his lips with a leer. “I’m kind of busy right now.”

Steve hears giggling somewhere in the room behind Hargrove and simultaneously wants to flee and also weep openly, ugh. It’s not like it’s a surprise that Hargrove isn’t alone. It’s after dinner. There isn’t a whole lot to do on this city when you’re off duty. Hargrove has always flaunted the fact that he’s never had a lack of willing companions.

It just feels like a slap in the face, now that Steve’s decided to do this. He shifts awkwardly on his feet and says, “No, it really can’t wait.”

Hargrove sighs. He steps out of the room and the door slides shut behind him. Leaning against the wall, he only loses a little bit of his swagger when he says, “So talk.”

Steve would prefer not to do this in the open hallway, but he also doesn’t want whoever the hell is in Hargrove’s room tonight to listen in.

He gives himself a silent pep talk: _you can do this, just say it, it’s like ripping off a bandaid, just tell him the truth._

Hargrove doesn’t fidget, but Steve can tell he’s getting impatient. Finally, he says, “Spit it out, Harrington.”

“I’m pregnant.” His voice is, admittedly, only a little louder than a mouse.

“What?”

“I’m pregnant,” Steve says, slightly louder, but still with a… hollow uncertainty. Did he actually say that out loud?

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Hargrove says, and he looks genuinely confused instead of pissed off, so that’s something.

“So sometimes,” Steve says, stuffing his hands into his pockets, “consuming questionable alien substances gives you, uh, certain reproductive parts? That you shouldn’t have?” He can’t help the way his voice sort of goes up there; it’s embarrassing, but not the worst part about this situation.

Hargrove’s hands ball into fists, the first sign that he’s getting _really annoyed,_ and says, “Seriously, what the _fuck_ are you talking about?”

There’s so much tension in Steve’s shoulders that his whole body feels brittle. He says, “You and me, six weeks ago, sex juice. Do the math, genius. If you don’t believe me, talk to Dr. Biro.”

Hargrove’s gaze dips to Steve’s stomach, then back up to his face again. He looks weirded out, then briefly _fond,_ Jesus, Steve must be imagining things, and then his mouth twists up into something close to disgust. “How the fuck does that happen, Harrington?”

“We weren’t exactly safe, asshole,” Steve says, swallowing down the hurt at Hargrove’s sneering expression.

“Yeah, ‘cause you were _begging_ for it, princess, so out of your _goddamn mind--”_

“Shut the fuck up.” Steve is not going to cry. That would suck so hard.

Hargrove shoves his hands through his hair and says, “I can’t.”

“You can’t what?” Steve says. “Be a decent human being? Because, _yeah,_ I can totally see that right now.”

“Uh, guys?”

_“What?”_ Hargrove growls, and Steve realizes that the door to his room’s slid open, and Denise from Botany is awkwardly standing there, more or less dressed, shoes in hand, hair a mess. Her mouth is red and Steve inexplicably wants to murder her.

She says, “I’m just gonna,” and points a finger down the hallway. “It sounds like you’re…” She trails off, and Steve glares at her until she makes a face and walks away.

The door slides shut again with a soft _whoosh._ Steve stubbornly stands his ground. He could tell him that they’re not sure it’s viable, whatever’s inside him, and that all this freaking out and angst could be for nothing, but somehow he doesn’t think that’ll alleviate anything, and as mad as he is, he hesitates to make this worse.

Hargrove is mulishly silent, staring off over Steve’s shoulder, and Steve’s tired.

And then Hargrove says, jaw clenched, still not looking him in the face, “If you’re fucking with me…”

“I’m,” Steve’s voice is thick and not nearly as harsh as he wants to be, “I’m not fucking with you.”

Hargrove nods, flicks a look at him and then away again. He says, “I can’t,” and, “let me,” with a sudden jitter to his whole body, and Steve takes a hasty step backward.

Hargrove just palms the controls on his door though, ducks his head and slips inside.

*

“So I hear I’m gonna be an aunt.” Max cocks her head. “Or a mom? Should I be mad that you’re stepping out on me?”

“Please don’t say that around your brother.” Steve is having enough problems with Hargrove, he’s been avoiding him all week, and he doesn’t need to remind him of his yet-to-be annulled alien marriage.

“Billy’s sulking,” Max says, squeezing into a seat next to Steve at the cramped table in Will’s office.

“Surprise, surprise,” Mike says under his breath. “Can we just play?”

Mike has been the most skeeved of all his friends about this, which Steve is _not_ surprised about. He’s also not surprised about the amount of scrutiny El gives him at every opportunity, as well as all the Robin-predicted Eggos. Lucas, Steve is fairly sure, is pretending it’s not actually happening.

Max says, “Oh, come on. Deep down Billy’s ecstatic and terrified. I mean, it’s not like he cares about _my_ honor.”

Steve blinks over at her. The dim light in Will’s office combined with her nearly unmanageable bangs makes her look particularly sinister. “Huh?”

“Oh my god,” Dustin says, straightening up in his chair. He drops his notebook and jabs the air with a finger. “Oh my god, that’s why he told Buckley to fuck off during the sex ritual!”

Will clears his throat. “Uh. Shouldn’t we…” He gestures to the book he has open in front of him.

Mike says, _“Yes,”_ like he’s desperate.

El looks like she’s reading everyone’s minds at once, brow scrunched in a v, expression daunting.

“But they had sex!” Dustin says, grinning widely.

Steve groans and covers his face.

“Yeah, I think we got that part, genius,” Max says, but she’s got an evil little smile on her face.

“I wish I could drink,” Steve says to no one and everyone.

Over everybody, Lucas shouts, “I’m rolling the dice!” and Dustin slaps at him and yells, “Will hasn’t even started yet!”

Max nudges Steve in the arm, leans close and says, just for them, “Don’t worry. You tell me where he has to be and when, and I’ll drag him there by his nose hairs.”

A small amount of tears well up into his eyeballs, because his life is terrible. It’s not like it wouldn’t be nice to have Hargrove there, holding his hand or whatever, while Biro makes worried sounds about his shrinking magical womb. He just doesn’t think it’ll happen, even if Max makes him go.

Still, he whispers back, “Thank you,” and let’s her pat him on the head like a dog.

*

Steve tells Max about his eight week appointment with Biro, but he doesn’t actually expect anything to come of it. Hargrove has been off-world with his new team for the past few days, there’s been some kind of underwater trench mapping off the east pier that Max is busy overseeing, and Robin’s contracted some sort of actual space flu, and isn’t allowed near him until she stops sneezing. He briefly considered bringing Dustin with him, but he doesn’t want Dustin to know about all the possible problems going on yet. If nobody else knows about it, then it isn’t as real.

The appointment goes about as well as it can, with Biro sounding equally concerned and fascinated, happy that he’s only shrunk barely half a centimeter, and that there’s still, “Plenty of room. Plenty of time. Don’t worry.” Steve can’t figure out if she’s lying or not.

He gets a vitamin booster and a small square black and white printout of a blob. When he’s alone, he slowly pulls on his t-shirt and stares down at his still flat tummy.

“Hey, you,” he says, poking at it gently. He feels _stupid,_ but he still says, “Try not to get smushed in there, okay? I’m getting kind of attached.”

He hangs a left outside the infirmary instead of a right and heads down to a transporter that’ll take him to the west side of the city.

There’s a corridor of glass that sweeps along the wing of the city under the water. There isn’t much life in the seas on their current planet, at least not at this shallow depth, but the sun, so low in the sky, lights the waves on fire, even this far underneath.

Steve presses up against the window, mesmerized by the undulating ripples. Something small, with tiny pale suckers, is stuck tight to a corner. Steve absently taps at it, and the thing unlatches with surprising speed and jets off into the steadily deepening murk.

His stomach growling startles him out of a light daze. It’s probably close to dinner time. Just as he turns to start back to the transporter, though, the lights cut out--an alarm starts to wail just as the emergency lights, a dull glowing blue, flicker on.

Fuck.

Steve hasn’t been kitted out properly in a month. Like a stupid sulking idiot, he’d left his communicator in his room for his appointment, and now he’s alone and vulnerable in the dark hallways. The sounding klaxons could mean anything--an attack through the ‘gate, a lab explosion, a contagion quarantine.

And it’s goddamn eerie that he doesn’t see anyone else at all.

Hell, they’ve had _time shifts_ before. He could be in the wrong dimension. On the deadly side of a containment breach.

If the main lights are off, the transporters won’t be working. The heart of the city has stairwells, but it’s a long trek of winding corridors and blind turns between there and here.

He doesn’t even have a fucking knife.

He’s crouched down under the windows, letting the dim light still filtering through the water illuminate the walls in front of him, leaving him mostly in shadow. He needs to figure out if staying here is the better option, and he’s weighing the chances of some sort of city wide invasion when somebody lurches around the corner-- _zombie?_ \--and gasps, “Fuck, Harrington. What the fuck?”

Steve slowly straightens up. “Hargrove?” He’s harried, in his BDU pants and a white tank, boots unlaced, like he just shoved them onto his feet and ran.

“Where the fuck is your radio?” Hargrove says, grasping Steve’s arms and shaking him a little. “We’ve been trying to reach you for an hour.”

An hour. Definitely a time shift, then. Maybe. It’s possible he’s lost track of how long he’s actually been out there; he zones out all the time now, it’s annoying.

“What’s going on?” he says. “Where is everybody?”

“Safe,” Hargrove says with a snarl. “Which you would be, too, if you didn’t go wandering the fuck off to god knows where after seeing Biro.”

_Oh,_ Steve tries and fails to say, mouths the word with no sound. So he really did know about that.

“What’s going on?” Steve says again, but gamely lets Hargrove tug him down the hallway, feeling inexplicably better now that he’s not alone.

Hargrove _huffs._ “Henderson let the narflap out.”

“The… I’m sorry, did you say _narflap?”_ Steve’s sure whatever it is is dangerous, given the level of freak out Hargrove’s exhibiting and the emergency alarm, but ‘narflap’ makes him think of floppy ears. And fuzz.

Hargrove peeks around a corner, and Steve lets him use his bulk to cover him, bemused, only because he still has no idea what they’re dealing with, and he doesn’t have his gun. Not that Hargrove seems to be armed, either.

He glances back at Steve and says, “Byers wanted to call it a demogorgon, but he got outvoted.”

Well, that’s infinitely more terrifying. “How does something like this even happen?”

“Because Henderson’s an idiot.”

“Hey!” Dustin isn’t an idiot. He just, sometimes, lacks common sense.

Suddenly, something that sounds extremely large and pissed off fucking roars. It echoes down the corridors.

Steve says, “You’re sure everyone’s safe?”

Hargrove gives him a look. It’s not flattering. “Sheppard’s got teams split up to take it down. _I_ was ordered to find you by those little punk-ass nerds you call friends.”

Steve doesn’t point out the unlikelihood of Hargrove ever listening to what his friends tell him to do. He doesn’t want to break whatever magic spell is causing Hargrove to hold onto his hand and worry about him. He’s kind of pathetic.

Something roars again. Steve tries not to think about the fact that it sounds closer.

Hargrove pushes Steve against the wall next to him and says, “Remember those things Henderson found on M4X-133?”

Steve wrinkles his nose. “On the planet where we found El? Those ones that looked like a burned rat crossed with a salamander?”

“Yeah. It’s a lot bigger now.”

The roar morphs into an angry screeching, like it’s super mad it hasn’t found anyone to eat yet. That doesn’t really bode well for them.

Steve tries his best to keep calm, but, “Weren’t there _two_ of them?”

“I’ll give you three guesses on how that turned out.”

Steve doesn’t want to think about it. He lowers his voice on, “How big is it now?”

“Big enough that we should be hiding,” Hargrove says in just as much of a hush. His gaze darts around the empty hallway. “Aren’t we near the botany labs?”

Steve shakes his head. “Other wing.” There’s nothing down here but the water, the abandoned bocce ball court, and the depressing store of personal items left from their people who died without family to send them home to.

There’s a strangely reassuring spate of gunfire accompanying the next echoing roar, but it’s still too close for comfort.

“Okay,” Hargrove says. “New plan. We run.” He turns to look at Steve, and Steve realizes he’s still got his wrist shackled with his fingers, and he looks genuinely scared.

“Wait,” Steve says, refusing to move when Hargrove starts counting down to run. They can’t run away, Atlantis is a finite space, and this particular pier is a dead end. “How did you even know I was out here?”

“I tracked your vitals, how do you think?” Hargrove says impatiently. “Biro would have one of those health drones following you around if she thought you’d let her.”

“Were you…” Steve is completely fucking baffled. “Were you checking up on me? Why?”

“I don’t know, Steve! Maybe it’s because you’re carrying my fucking baby around in your freak body! Is this really the time? Can we please move?”

Gunfire gives way to a high-pitched scream. Steve has no idea if it’s from the narflap, or from one of their men.

“There’s still the, uh, funereal storeroom,” Steve says. It’s the only enclosed space he knows of out there.

Hargrove makes a face. “The Graveyard.”

Steve flaps his free hand. “Would you rather die?”

“Fine,” Hargrove says. “Let’s go.”

*

The storeroom, the _Graveyard,_ is still closer to the heart of the city than where they’d been. Steve leads them, this time, and hisses, “Why didn’t you bring me a gun?” when he spots the massive slime footprints, the splatter of something that looks decidedly _blood-like_ on the walls, and feels only a little relief that it’s definitely not human.

Hargrove doesn’t answer.

With the city on auxiliary power, the door crystals won’t unlock.

“Now what?” Hargrove says, like this is Steve’s fault. Like he asked Hargrove to come find him in a crisis, alone, unarmed, because that sure doesn’t sound like _Steve_ is being the stupid one.

Emergency power still means some power, though— they just have to convince the city to use it here.

Steve has a fairly strong ATA gene, but it isn’t natural. Sometimes, Atlantis gets testy with him.

He also knows absolutely nothing about whatever bolts and wires hold all this magic together. He pries the casing off the lock and latch and waves a hand over it. “Wanna sweet talk it, Hargrove? Use your masculine wiles?”

Something _wails._

Hargrove pushes Steve aside with surprising gentleness, and then rips two crystals out and a handful of wires.

“McKay will kill you,” Steve says, but Hargrove just gives him a look.

There’s a hiss click of a lock disengaging, and then Hargrove leverages the door open enough for them to slip in with his bare hands. Steve definitely doesn’t find that hot.

Inside is small. Will’s office kind of small, and packed with much more stuff. Years worth of stuff, boxes and boxes of personal items no one knew what to do with, but it seemed disrespectful to just… toss out. It’s why it’s there instead of going home on a Daedalus run. Stargate Command wouldn’t know what to do with it all either.

Superstition named it the Graveyard, but it’s not spooky. There are no ghosts there.

Steve tells himself all this as he pants in the near darkness, fingers curled into fists so he doesn’t grope for Hargrove’s hand.

“Do you know what their plan is?” he asks.

“Kill it,” Hargrove says flatly.

Steve wants to say, ‘Kill it how?’ and, ‘What kind of weapons are they using?’ and, ‘Has it hurt anyone yet?’ but he doesn’t think Hargrove’ll tell him anything, even if he knows.

The communicator on Hargrove’s shoulder crackles and Max says, “Billy--” immediately cut off by Dustin shouting, “Is the package secure?”

In the dim, blue glow of the storeroom, Steve can see Hargrove’s jaw clench and release on a sigh.

Hargrove says, “Harrington’s here.”

Max says, “El says Dustin’s an idiot.”

Hargrove grins at Steve, and Steve rolls his eyes and says, “She didn’t.” El would never call anyone an idiot, not unless she super hated them.

“Well, she said he’s not smart, and that we’re all going to get eaten,” Max says, but Steve is fairly sure he can hear a smile in her voice. “So Colonel Sheppard managed to get it off the city and into the water, but there’s a slight chance it can swim. Where are you guys?”

“Storeroom,” Hargrove says. “We’re fine until we get an all clear.”

The words surprise Steve; Hargrove’s usually loud about being inconvenienced, and they’re stuck in a packed, eight by eight room that they can barely move in without touching elbows.

Steve wants to yell, ‘You _do_ care about me!’ but he’s honestly terrified of how Hargrove will snap back. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. Hargrove will never admit it, and he tends to act like a rabid wolverine when he’s cornered.

Steve feels stupid and slightly claustrophobic. It’s too hot, and the longer they silently stand there, waiting, the more Steve doesn’t know what to say.

He opens and closes his mouth and hopes it’s too dim for Hargrove to actually notice.

And then Hargrove says, “So, uh,” and motions to Steve’s stomach. “Everything okay?”

Yeah, _no,_ Steve thinks. They were absolutely not doing awkward small talk about the baby. No way. Hargrove doesn’t get to be a dick to him every single time they’ve been forced together--and missions count; he might have mostly been an _amusing_ dick to him, but Steve’s not in the mood to be gracious--and then all of a sudden act _blandly concerned._

Steve wants hot dogs. Robin says he’s not allowed to have them, which just makes him crave them more.

Steve is on a rollercoaster of emotions right now, and he’s afraid if they don’t get rescued soon, he’s going to do something embarrassing, like breakdown and sob.

He wants hot dogs _and_ a banana and orange juice mixed with sprite.

Hargrove’s still looking at him expectantly, though, like Steve should be grateful he’s taking this much of an interest. Well, _fuck him,_ Steve thinks, and crosses his arms over his chest.

“Steve?” Hargrove says. His hand is hovering, like he wants to touch him. His expression, when Steve really looks at him, seems horrifyingly sincere.

Fuck.

Steve is not okay. Steve’s body is doing _weird things,_ and the weird things might not even matter, in the end. This might still only end up a footnote in his military file: _alien marriage, temporary magical pregnancy, death by wraith, no surviving family members--_ god, now he’s getting _maudlin._

He rubs his hands over his face and and groans and says, “I got knocked up during an alien fertility ritual by an asshole who hates me, how do you _think_ I’m doing?” He offers Hargrove a watery grin, a shrug, to soften his words, and Hargrove’s hand drops, fingers lightly skimming down the outside of Steve’s arm.

He says, _“Steve,”_ again, but then the radio crackles and Max says, “Kill confirmed, you yahoos can come home now,” and Dustin says, “I saved you some spaghetti, Steven!”

Steve’s stomach growls audibly.

Hargrove sighs and says, “C’mon. You should eat.”

*

Steve is slowly going stir crazy. He doesn’t understand anyone who doesn’t want to go off-world--there’s nothing in the city but sleek steel and chrome, and even the balconies and piers make him feel trapped.

The good thing, though, is that as long as Biro signs off on it, Sheppard lets him do whatever he wants.

Their current homebase planet is small and mostly covered in water, but there’s also a decent sized, mountainous continent. It’s mostly sheer cliffs and craggy rock with tough-rooted plants and crooked, skinny trees butting up to the ocean.

Biro’s biggest concern is Stargate travel, not puddle jumpers, so all he needs is a pilot.

Robin’s not susceptible to his wiles, but it’s pretty easy to get her to feel bad for him. He’ll totally take pity if it gets him off the city.

When they land and he wanders out of the back hatch, he stretches his arms out to the bright sky and grins, ignoring the weird twinge that’s started in his lower back. He’s not even really showing yet, but he’s carrying his weight a little differently, and he doesn’t like to think about it too hard. The sun is shining. Some sort of bird is making horrible caw sounds. There are small deer that have teeth here, apparently, and toad-like amphibians that _sing_ and Steve can’t wait to meet them.

He rolls his shoulders, pats his belly, and says, “Fresh air, hiking, hey,” he shouts back to Robin, “is there anywhere safe we can swim?”

Steve’s been on the mainland exactly once, to help pick up a couple botanists, and this side of the planet had been on the brink of a stormy deep freeze--they’d stayed fifteen minutes and almost got hit by a blizzard flying home.

“I don’t think so. I think everything’s poisonous.” She hefts a camera, grinning. “Ready to film some freaky wildlife?”

It’s a good day.

Steve gets to wear sunglasses and pose in front of weird animals and they eat sandwiches and apples on a jetty, watching small, neon green crabby creatures scuttle in the rocky tidepools below them.

And then Robin says, “So. Hargrove.”

He stuffs half a sandwich in his mouth and mumbles, “What about him?”

She arches an eyebrow. “I noticed he’s being less of a douchebag lately.”

“I’m not sure if that’s, like,” he makes a face, “some mean feat we should praise him for.” _Less of a douchebag_ is still a douchebag.

Still. The sun is setting. The haze off the softly rolling sea makes it look like they’re sitting on top of a marble. The air has a heavy salt tang on it that makes his mouth water and his nose burn when he takes a deep, bracing breath.

There’s a tiny foreign flutter in his belly that he’s not sure is real or imagined. Should he be feeling that this early?

And Hargrove has been _less of a douchebag._ He sighs.

He says, “He brought me a box of crackers yesterday. I’m pretty sure he stole them.”

“Nice,” Robin says.

Sure. _Nice,_ Steve thinks. It’s awkward and weird, but yeah. Nice. He’ll take it.

*

At sixteen weeks, he’s just starting to show a small bump--Biro is tentatively happy with his size and growth. And lately Hargrove has been... hovering. Kind of. Steve isn’t exactly sure what’s going on with him, but he’s had his thoughtful moments: the crackers, saving him the last of the pie during dinner if he comes in late, holding doors open for him when they cross paths over a threshold instead of, you know, the usual slamming it in his face. 

And although Max clearly threatened him into doing it, he _does_ show up to hold Steve’s hand during his latest checkup with Biro.

Steve’s hand is sweaty with nerves and Hargrove says, “It looks like a kidney bean with limbs,” and Biro beams at them both like she, personally, is responsible for this tiny miracle growing in his belly.

She says, “I think we can make it to twenty-two, maybe even twenty-three weeks,” way too cheerily.

Steve feels like his heart has dropped into his stomach. He knows that was the plan, but he’d also been optimistically thinking he could make it much further than that.

Hargrove says, flatly, “What.”

“We’ve found designs for the perfect artificial womb,” Biro goes on, oblivious. “I’m working with Dr. Henderson, it’s going to be fine.”

_“Henderson?”_ Hargrove says. “What the fuck is going on, Steve?”

Biro’s eyes go wide. She says, “Oh, I--” She opens and closes her mouth. “I’ll just be… not here anymore,” she finally adds, and then ducks around the curtain and disappears.

Steve sighs.

“Harrington,” Hargrove says on a growl.

“I was going to tell you.”

Hargrove looks furious, and Steve holds his hands up and out, placating, and says, “I _was,_ I swear. I just,” his shoulders slump, “was too busy pretending it wasn’t really happening. I guess.”

“You guess? You _guess?”_ He’s shouting, and Steve flinches involuntarily, he can’t help it, but then Hargrove’s gathering up his hands and pressing them over his heart and saying, “Is this dangerous? Are you going to die? Steve, what--” and looking so fucking torn up about it that Steve is stunned completely fucking speechless.

“I’m.” He clears his throat, trying to dislodge the knot sitting at the top of his lungs. “It’s just.” He starts and stops, pinned by Hargrove’s intense, blue-eyed stare. “The baby. Gestation must be different there, because, uh. The magic’s wearing off. He might not make it.”

“The baby,” Hargrove echoes. Steve watches the tense line of his shoulders relax and then tighten again. “He?”

There’s just… a lot of emotion in their current area, a lot of tangible, touching _moments,_ and that’s the only reason Steve’s eyes are stinging. He says, “You heard Biro, right? Dustin’s on the case. Nothing to worry about.”

Hargrove doesn’t look happy, but he loosens his grip on Steve’s hands. His thumbs sort of absently caress his wrists, though, back and forth, and the backs of Steve’s arms tingle, and the inside of his thighs, and--

_Oh god,_ Steve thinks, horrified at how much he’s not actually horrified. He wants to have sex with Hargrove again. Hormones are a bitch.

Right.

Steve shifts a little and tries to gently twist his hands out of Hargrove’s grip without calling attention to the fact that Hargrove is gripping him at all.

And if he feels a little bereft when Hargrove drops him like he’s on fire, well. He’s certainly not going to say anything about it out loud.

*

It takes a mere two days of daydreaming about Hargrove for Steve to admit to himself that it probably isn’t just about sex. That it isn’t just being turned on, because being important enough to Hargrove for him to worry about is nice. The stolen crackers, the random soups left at his door, the occasional help with his lunch tray, the attentiveness: all of that is _nice._ Addictively nice.

But apparently recognizing and accepting that just makes Steve flustered _all the time._ It’s the worst.

He used to have game. He used to charm the ladies and gents alike back at the SGC, and the only reason he hasn’t been just as successful here, honestly, is the thought of having exes he couldn’t just get away from unless he traveled back through space.

God, Steve isn’t even sure if he _likes_ Hargrove, or if he just wants to aggressively snuggle him. And maybe touch his dick.

He’s so worried about being obvious that he doesn’t even notice at first when it all stops. When it doesn’t just stop, but has Hargrove disappearing altogether.

And it’s not like it’s actually abnormal, his disappearance. It’s not like it’s something that didn’t happen regularly, when they were off-mission, given a few days downtime. They used to be on a team together, though, so after those few days downtime came enforced bonding amid often harrowing adventures.

Without that, the complete absence of Hargrove is more... pronounced.

Will’s like a nervous ferret: adorable, occasionally wily, hides in small spaces. He bites at his fingernails and tries to smile at Steve and says, “Maybe he’s just busy?”

It could be Steve’s imagination, but Will’s office seems even more dusty and ominous. He’s somehow managed to scrounge up an old lamp, but the bulb is so dim it only lights a modest ring around Will’s desk.

Steve says, “Maybe,” but he doesn’t believe it. Atlantis is a closed society. It’s impossible not to trip over everyone you know, and some people you don’t, on a daily basis. The only way that wouldn’t happen is if someone was doing it on purpose. Avoiding him. Like he’s diseased, instead of just carrying his accidental baby. Like Hargrove took one look at Steve’s flushed, besotted face and noped right out of there.

It’s been three weeks. Steve’s been to two appointments with Biro by himself. He’d tell Max, but he doesn’t want to force Hargrove to keep him company. Not anymore.

Will’s eyes widen. He leans forward and says in a hush, like anyone could possibly be listening in, “Do you… I mean. Are you--do you _love_ him?”

Steve grimaces. The thing is, he’s not sure it’s possible to love someone you spent so long hating. Hargrove’s brash and obnoxious, and has been a pain in Steve’s ass for the six long months they spent traveling Pegasus together.

But on the other hand, weird bonds grow from stressful situations. Dustin’s been practically his brother for years, but Robin and, apparently, Hargrove, have weaseled their way into his heart after months of death-defying missions, wraith scares, harvest festivals, angry villagers, dinosaurs, and _sex rituals._ They’re… family. Sort of. He doesn’t want to see any of them get killed. That could, under certain lights, be construed as love.

The way Will says it, though, like it’s a secret shame, makes Steve’s cheeks burn and chest hurt. Junior is a solid push on his skin--Biro says it’s because he’s so lean, normally--and Steve cradles the slight mound and wonders, for the first time, how many people on Altantis think he’s a freak.

*

It is, Steve thinks, the combination of insomnia, heartburn, and not being able to fit into his BDU pants anymore that causes him to knock on Hargrove’s door in the middle of the night.

He’s angry and tired and wants a hamburger, and he knows for a fact that they’re out of ground beef. The next Daedalus run isn’t set for another two weeks, and Steve wants to die.

He knocks, and then waits five minutes, and then knocks again. Faintly, he hears a thump and some cursing from the room. When the door finally slides open, Steve’s got his arms crossed and his eyes burning with unshed tears.

Hargrove’s shirtless. He scrubs a hand over his face, eyes squinted with sleep, hair wild, and says, “Harrington?”

Steve spares a brief glance at his bare skin, the fall of his blue civilian dog tags over his frankly stunning pecs, and hunches in on himself even more. He says, “Are you ashamed of me?”

Hargrove stares at him blankly. “The fuck?” He’s in boxer briefs, twisted at the waist, like he was naked in bed. Possibly with company.

The burn at Steve’s eyes swells as his throat goes dry and something squeezes his heart. This was a bad idea. Steve’s had so many bad ideas, these past couple months. “Never mind,” he says, voice thick. “Sorry for, uh.” He waves a hand, and then startles when Hargrove reaches out to grab it. The movement’s slow, Steve could’ve easily dodged it, but Hargrove’s calloused fingers circle his wrist, slide down his forearm to rest lazily on the crook of his elbow.

“Wait,” Hargrove says. He yawns and smoothly pulls Steve closer. “What time’s it? Are you okay?”

“It’s late. Sorry.” Steve doesn’t try and tug away. “I don’t need anything.”

Hargrove arches a sleepy eyebrow. “Not what I asked, Steve.”

Steve can’t stop his breath from hitching, from an involuntary sniff as he tries to pull back the ridiculous fucking tears.

He’s _tired._

“Okay,” Hargrove says. “Come on.”

Steve trip-walks into Hargrove’s room, wary but grateful as Hargrove’s grip moves from his arm to around his back, and something unclenches, makes him slump, when he sees the small, messy quarters are empty.

His bed is narrow and he pushes Steve down into it, gently wrestles blankets and sheets out from under them as he nudges Steve further in against the wall, spoons up behind him. Steve slowly rubs his face against the pillow, brushing off the wetness on his cheeks. Hargrove wraps an arm over his middle, splays a hand over Steve’s belly like he’s not afraid of what’s underneath.

Steve freezes for a long moment, unsure.

_“Sweetheart,”_ Hargrove says, whisper-soft at the back of his neck, and Steve squeezes his eyes closed and holds in a sob.

*

At first, Steve’s not exactly sure where he is--he’s comfy and warm, but he’s on the wrong side of the bed, and there’s too much sun flooding through the window. Steve’s room faces sunset, and he always makes sure his blinds are tight, too.

He blinks his eyes open to the sound of rushing water. The bathroom’s on the wrong side of the room.

The sun is bright enough to be mid-morning. Steve, if he’s remembering correctly, is apparently still in Hargrove’s quarters, but he’s strangely mellow about it. He’s already completely embarrassed himself, showing up in the middle of the night, crying. Hargrove didn’t even wake him up to poke fun of him. And now… Steve’s not sure if he wants to get up or not. If he should slink out before Hargrove’s done in the shower. If he should curl up and pretend to be still asleep. If he’d even get away with it.

When the water cuts off, he’s halfway through sitting up, conscious of the way his t-shirt stretches over the small swell of his belly. He feels silly in his sock-feet. He sits on the edge of the bed, waiting, when the bathroom door slides open and Hargrove steps out in a towel, still-wet curls sticking to his neck and shoulders.

Steve swallows hard and says, “You’re avoiding me.”

Hargrove turns toward his dresser. “I’ve been busy.” He glances at Steve’s face and grimaces. “Biro said stress is bad for the baby.”

He says it so easily: _the baby._

Steve watches him drop his towel, feels heat prickling his cheeks. He takes his sweet time pulling out a pair of boxers, like he’s making some kind of point. Hargrove’s never been awkward about nudity before, they’ve both been in quarantine together too many times after wonky missions, but somehow this is completely awkward anyway.

“What does that have to do with you avoiding me?” Steve asks.

Hargrove faces him again, hands on his hips. “Princess,” he says, gently mocking, and Steve’s left eye twitches. “See? We bug the shit out of each other on _good_ days. We’re never going to have any good days again.”

“We aren’t,” Steve says woodenly, and then, more strident, “Of course we won’t. Why would we--”

“Hey.” Hargrove moves closer. “C’mon. I don’t think we’ve spent a single day not yelling at each other since we’ve met. The yelling's _fun_ and all--”

“Fun?”

“--but Biro barely thinks you’re gonna make it another month. Can you really blame me?”

“Junior’s fine,” Steve says, still kind of stuck on ‘fun’ yelling, “and you _avoiding me_ is what’s been stressing me out, Billy! I can’t believe--what? What’s happening to your face?”

Hargrove’s beaming at him. Steve’s not sure he’s ever seen a smile so big and genuine from him, at least not aimed his way.

“You called me Billy,” he says, possibly beaming _wider._

“Oh fuck you, that’s not a thing,” Steve says, only his heart is pounding.

Hargrove licks his lips obscenely. “It’s totally a thing.”

“That’s an unfounded rumor about McKay and Sheppard,” Steve says, feeling slightly trapped, sitting on the end of the bed while Hargrove takes another step closer, “and you shouldn’t buy into rumors about Command.” The first name, last name thing is practically Atlantis folklore, though, it’s not like Steve’s never speculated about it himself. But years of last names culminating in first name use is totally not a declaration of love.

Steve says, desperate, “You call me Steve all the time.”

Hargrove nods, grin softening a little. “True. I’ve been calling you Steve since we met.”

“Mockingly calling me King Steve doesn’t count.” He’s not sure what point he’s trying to make now. Hargrove’s warm and solid and way too close; he’s scattered, and his palms are sweaty.

“Okay,” Hargrove concedes with a shrug. “I’ve been calling you Steve for months.”

“But.” Steve twists his fingers in the blankets. Hargrove’s nearly between his knees; if he tried to stand now, he’d be fetched up all along Hargrove’s front. But… That _can’t_ mean what Steve thinks it means. Right?

With a huff, a half-laugh, Hargrove moves off to his dresser again, leaving Steve feeling strangely bereft.

He pulls on BDU pants, a tank top. Throws Steve a pair of sweatpants before shrugging into a button up uniform shirt.

He says, “I’ve got an off-world mission in three hours. Want to get some breakfast with me?”

Steve clutches the pants and stares up at him, trying to gauge his mood. Hargrove’s grin isn’t as big, but he seems weirdly sincere. And Steve _is_ hungry. “Okay.”

He feels ridiculous, pulling on Hargrove’s sweats; there’s a brief moment of panic where he doesn’t know whether to pull them up over the slight swell of his stomach or tie them tight underneath, and what makes it worse, honestly, is that Hargrove stares at him the whole time--Steve avoids looking directly at this face, but he’s pretty sure he’s smirking. Bastard.

And then Steve’s fingers get flustered and he feels more than sees Hargrove move closer, reaching out, pushing Steve’s hands out of the way and competently and quickly tugging the strings tight and tying a little bow.

His knuckles are light and fleeting on Steve’s belly. He sucks in a startled breath, but Hargrove just moves away.

“Ready?” he asks. He’s already palming the door panel, and Steve doesn’t even realize he’s still just in socks until he’s caught up to him halfway down the corridor.

He thinks _fuck it,_ though. He’s pregnant. Everyone can deal.

*

For the next couple weeks, they have some sort of truce. Hargrove’ll sit with him at most meals when he’s not on missions. He’ll bug him about vitamins, and eating too much applesauce--which, is that even possible--and if Steve shows up in the middle of the night, he only ribs him a little while tucking him into his bed, only a hint of bite to his words when he calls him ‘princess.’

The strangest part of all that, really, the part that baffles the fuck out of Steve, is that he doesn’t take advantage of all this knowledge: of how Steve worms his cold feet in between Hargrove’s calves, or how he snorts himself awake, sometimes, if he’s flat on his back. Hargrove never says a word, not even to Tommy.

It’s bizarre.

“He’s being considerate,” Robin says, but even she doesn’t look like she fully believes it.

Steve is so sure he’s biding his time for something horrible. Maybe he’s waiting until their son is born--and, Jesus Christ, he’s having a son with Hargrove.

Some part of Steve hopes that’s not true; _knows_ it’s not true, hoards every single ‘Steve’ that falls out of Hargrove’s mouth so easily. But there’s an infinitely bigger part that remembers how Steve’s somehow rubbed Hargrove the wrong way since the day they met: Steve, excited that he’d finally got the go-ahead to put together his own exploration ‘gate team, and Hargrove, fresh off the Daedalus, trying to prove he’s tougher than all the military grunts. So Steve had laughed, of course, only a little, because Dr. William Hargrove’s a xenobiologist, and Steve’s worked his ass off to get to his current rank; he’s been captured by wraith _twice_ and escaped to tell about it.

Hargrove may’ve been some big shot back in Stargate Command, but Pegasus is a whole other ballgame. But then, you know, Hargrove had matched him blow for blow on the mat. Their sparring had to, embarrassingly enough, be broken up by Sheppard.

As they worked through being on a team together, though, Steve grudgingly conceded that Hargrove’s hot-shot SGC reputation might have been earned. Hargrove’s a mouthy asshole, but he’s proven to be more than competent in the field. The problem, though, the biggest problem, always for them, is that Hargrove never really acted like that respect ran both ways.

He absolutely knows that, from the way Hargrove and Hagan and Perkins would slant looks at each other, the way Hargrove would hang around the decontamination showers, half-naked, leaning against lockers or walls, watching Steve with mocking, slitted eyes. Steve would bristle like a cat, he couldn’t help it.

And that was even before the whole _Max thing_ had happened.

They’re just... _not_ meant to get along. Ever.

Biro rounds the curtain on Steve’s infirmary cot and says, “Well,” just as Hargrove slides into the room, uniform covered in muck and… smoking slightly? His hair has, Steve’s fairly sure, a slightly green tinge to it.

Hargrove says, “I’m here,” breathing hard.

Biro takes one look at him and points him back out the door. “No,” she says.

“But--”

“Whatever is all over you does not need to be all over Sergeant Harrington.” She wrinkles her nose. It does kind of smell.

“They aren’t toxic,” Hargrove says.

Robin says, “Hargrove. Did something explode on you?”

“I’m not going to miss--”

“We’ll wait,” Steve says.

Robin’s mouth snaps closed, and her eyes go wide.

Biro’s lips are pinched, but she doesn’t argue.

He’s at twenty-three weeks, and he really hopes no one calls him on wanting his baby daddy here for whatever Biro’s going to reveal. He’s on edge, he’s had mild stomach cramping all morning that he’s absolutely regretting not telling anyone about, and if Hargrove is hellbent on holding his hand right now, he doesn’t care what ulterior motives he may or may not be harboring. He’ll take it.

Biro says, “Fine,” and, “Fifteen minutes,” and Hargrove nods at Steve with a surprisingly grateful look that he chooses to ignore.

Robin says, “Do you want me to stay?”

“Yes,” Steve says. His eyes itch, but he refuses to acknowledge the tears.

Robin leans close and swipes her thumbs along his cheeks though, and doesn’t say anything about it.

*

There really isn’t a question about it: he should be much bigger. “You’re losing some elasticity,” Biro says.

She wants to schedule a cesarean. She wants to cut him out, and then place him in the incubator, and then have a stasis pod on hand for any complications--for him or the baby.

“Maybe you should have two,” Hargrove says, scowling sort of belligerently, but Biro’s already nodding, saying, “Yes, yes, we’ll be ready if anything goes wrong.”

But then Steve’s belly cramps up, low, and Biro can probably feel it under her hands even as Steve tries his best to look impassive under the sudden stretch of pain.

“Sergeant,” she says, voice threaded with concern, “how long have you been having contractions?”

Robin’s hand tightens in his. She says, “Are you _kidding me,_ Steve?”

“It’s not contractions,” Steve says, but his argument is weak.

Biro doesn’t call him on it, but she does say, “I hope you’re ready to be a mom, Sergeant,” and Hargrove doesn’t even snicker, so he knows he’s in trouble.

Steve says, “I didn’t think it was anything,” and tries not to feel stupid as Hargrove just frowns at him. He didn’t _want_ it to be anything. He figured it might have been one of those ‘ignore it till it goes away’ things, like morning sickness and processed meat cravings.

Biro says, “I’d rather have more time to prepare, but it’s not like we haven’t been ready for anything for weeks.” She’s _invested._ She’d given him a little yellow blanket she’d knitted just last month.

She pats his shoulder and says, “Everything’s going to be fine.”

*

He’s awake for it, which is weird. They sort of hide his body from view with a curtain and numb him up a lot and Robin makes faces and holds his hand, while Hargrove is strangely silent on the other side. It’s unnerving.

And when it’s over, Steve doesn’t even get to hold him.

He’s the tiniest thing Steve’s ever seen in his entire life. He could fit in him the palm of his hand, if he was allowed to. Instead, he’s attached to monitors and tubes that seem to dwarf him even more, and the most Steve can do is nestle the tip of his gloved finger in his tiny, wrinkled hand.

Hargrove is… Steve doesn't even know. He hadn’t stuck around much longer than it took to stabilize Junior’s vitals.

Steve’s stomach pulls where he’s stitched up, but it doesn’t stop him from laying on his side, leaving his arm stretched out so he can just barely touch him, the incubator pushed up as close to his bed as all the wires will allow.

It’s late, he thinks. It’s the middle of the night. He’s been drifting in and out of a doze, reluctant to fully close his eyes. There’s an ambient blue glow of Atlantis surrounding them, like the city is a living, breathing thing.

“I can’t keep calling you Junior,” Steve says softly. He always thought he’d know who he was, when he saw him. Know if he’s a Robert or a Dorian from the shape of his eyebrows, the shells of his ears. But it’s hard to tell now, under all the working parts keeping him alive. Steve is terrified. He’s not sure he’s going to ever fully sleep again.

He’s exhausted, though, and he wakes up with a jolt some indeterminate time later--still dark, room illuminated softly blue--to find the covers pulled up to his chin, and Hargrove on the floor by the side of his bed.

Hargrove says, without looking over at him, “Do you think he can hear us talk?”

“Yeah,” Steve says.

Hargrove tilts his head back onto the mattress. He’s got his legs bent, hands draped over his knees. “He looks like a gremlin.”

A hoarse bark of laughter slips out and Steve says, _“Yeah,”_ again. His beautiful, tiny, strong gremlin. “We’re not naming him Stripe.”

*

They fall into a weird little routine that revolves entirely around Junior: watching him sleep, touching his little hand, the tiny little feet, all while blatantly not talking about it. Eventually, Biro makes them sit down and think about wills, caretakers and dying, which leads to Steve realizing that he and Hargrove can never be on an off-world team together again. He’s strangely disappointed by that.

He gets given back Robin, though, and Dustin, and Dr. Erica Sinclair, Lucas’s little sister, who is unimpressed by everything, but apparently an extremely competent botanist, and amateur explosives nut.

Almost seven weeks after Junior’s born, Steve steps through the Stargate for the first time in months. It’s an easy mission, but even milk runs have the tendency to go pear shaped quickly. He left Hargrove in the infirmary, half asleep in a chair in front of the incubator, and if Biro lets him hold him for the first time while Steve’s gone, he’s never going to forgive either of them. He made them promise, that’s the only reason he agreed to leave--Junior’s gained a whopping two pounds already, and Biro thinks his lungs are almost strong enough to breathe on his own.

“You know, we didn’t have to do this,” Robin says, a hand over her eyes to block out the bright blue-tinted sun. There’s sand dunes as far as the eye can see, and Steve really hopes this planet doesn’t have giant worms.

They’re there to check out a distress beacon. A scan showed no significant life signs, but who knows--they probably wouldn’t be able to pick up anything that lives deep in the ground. Mostly, they just really need to find the energy signal, and see if they can salvage anything resembling a ZPM.

Sinclair scans the horizon with her hands on her hips. “This place is a real waste of my talents. Where are we supposed to go?”

Dustin spins around in a circle, holding his scanner. He stops, facing away from the glaring sun, and says, “That way,” with a flap of his hand.

It’s quiet and hot; sweat drips down Steve’s spine, and makes the collar of his shirt damp. It’s oppressive. And kind of boring. On point, Steve can’t even chat with Robin, who’s got their six and is--at a glance back--chewing gum and staring up at the sky.

Between them, Dustin’s trying to show off for Sinclair and failing spectacularly.

“I mean,” Sinclair says, “there’s not even a cactus, I feel like Command could’ve tried harder.”

Steve agrees, but he’s not going to say so out loud. There’s sand in his boots, and he wishes he brought a boonie.

And then Dustin calls out, “Wait,” and Steve turns to see him frowning down at the ground. He scuffs something with his foot and says, “Huh.”

Robin peers over his shoulder when he crouches down to swipe something clear. She says, “Is that… is that a puddle jumper designation?”

Dustin tucks his scanner into his back pocket and scrabbles with both hands. The latch pops with an audible hiss. He looks up at Steve, then back at Robin. “Yeah,” he says. “It is.”

There shouldn't be a puddle jumper out this far. At least, not if it’s one of theirs. “Replicators?”

“Oh man,” Dustin groans, drops the hatch and starts wiping his hands on his thighs. “That just means scrubbing right? Detox showers are the worst, but even worse is the scrubbing. And that,” he wiggles a little, “kill light. I keep losing communicators that way!”

“I thought that was on purpose,” Robin says, grinning. “For that cute c-off, Suzie.”

“First of all,” Dustin says, wagging a finger, “it’s not c-off, military people don’t shorten communications officer to _c-off,_ you just do this to annoy me. Secondly,” he gets back to his feet, “Suzie is an angel and a lady, I would _never_ do anything like that on purpose.”

Robin snorts, but she arches an eyebrow at Steve and says, “Your call.”

Steve sighs. The responsible thing to do is to check it out, but he’s not risking anyone else down there. He waves Dustin out of the way and tugs out his flashlight.

Dustin puffs out his chest and says, “Oh, no way, you’re a mom now! _I’ll_ go.”

“It’s probably nothing,” Steve says, pushing him off the hatch. When Dustin looks like he wants to protest more, he says, “It’s my job, Dustin. If I wanted to stop doing this, I’d just go home. Okay?”

And that’s the thing: he could go home. He’s got plenty of leave saved up. Hell, Sheppard would probably sign off on a medical discharge. But there’s monsters at home, surely as there’s monsters here, and no one on earth could truly appreciate all that Steve’s been through, so. Thanks very much, but he’ll take the possibility of sand worms and replicators and wraith. At least here he has back up.

“Buckley! Are you going to just let him go down there _by himself?”_ Dustin says, already dropping his backpack and kneeling on the ground next to the hole as Steve swings his legs over the edge.

“I don’t know,” Robin says. “What are the odds that there’s actually giant sand worms down there, right?”

Steve rolls his eyes. He pops the end of the light into his mouth and holds onto the warm metal and gently lowers himself down.

It’s dusty and dark, but the square of light from the hatch helps Steve assimilate his eyes--he can make out the outlines of seats. He can tell that the puddle jumper is upright, and that he’d come in from the emergency hatch on the top, and not the one on the bottom near the cockpit. It smells stale and warm. He sweeps the flashlight over the cargo hold and through the open doorway before stepping further in. Up front, he comes face to face with a skeleton, and lets out a little involuntary shriek.

“Steve?” Dustin shouts.

“Fine, fine,” Steve says after swallowing his heart back down. They can cross off replicators though. Dustin’ll be happy about that.

There’s no scent of death and decay, so whoever this is has been down here a long, long time. What a fucking terrible way to go. He really hopes they Ascended, but he doesn’t know enough about Alterans to recognize any signs.

Steve cautiously reaches past the skeleton toward the blinking light on the dashboard. The HUD lights up briefly as his hand hovers over the controls, but all the words are in Ancient. He clicks it off, and even though it wasn’t making any audible sounds, the entire jumper seems to... stop. Grow quiet as a tomb. It’s super creepy.

Conscious of his breath picking up--the slightest bit of panic mixed with the totally valid sense of being buried alive--Steve crouches down and pries the panel off the front of the dash with his knife and very little finesse.

He’s here. He’s not going to find a ZPM, obviously, but power crystals are still a hot commodity too.

Before he can pull them, though, he thinks about this person’s last hours and he also thinks about _Will,_ and he knows if Will knows he was here at a death scene of someone that possibly lived thousands of years ago and didn’t get as much information as he could, Will would cry big, thick tears that he can call up whenever he wants; it makes him look like one of those puppies that look like bears only _sad._ Ugh.

“Dustin,” he calls up. “Do you have some way we can download everything in this system’s memory before I pull the plug?”

“Do I!” Dustin says excitedly, and scrambles down into the puddle jumper so fast he barely catches himself before falling onto his face.

*

“His name was J’ovan. He wasn’t Alteran,” Will says, plunking down a datapad and several notebooks on the commissary table. “He and his wife, J’ella, were fleeing the wraith, I think. They must have picked up an abandoned puddle jumper, though I _can’t_ explain the Ancient language, or how they ended up with an ATA gene strong enough to even fly it. Yet.”

“That’s great,” Max says. “I’m so glad Steve risked his life for normal random aliens with no worth whatsoever.”

“Hey--”

“Oh, it’s not _me_ you have to worry about,” Max says, shaking up her orange juice carton. “Someone told Billy.”

Steve makes a face. He didn’t risk his life any more than he does just stepping through the freaking Stargate, first of all, and second of all, what could Hargrove _possibly_ do to him about it? There’s a tiny inkling of unease at the back of his head, though. They’d gotten back to Atlantis late the night before, and then Steve had slept in the infirmary with Junior, and he hadn’t seen Hargrove at all that morning, which was only slightly suspicious, given their revolving schedule around the baby.

He hastily stuffs a piece of toast in his mouth and gets to his feet. “I’ll just, uh. Definitely not be hiding.”

He’s thinking about a second shower--sand is a bitch to get off--when he palms the door to his quarters open and finds Hargrove waiting for him on the other side.

“Jesus Christ,” Steve says, hand to his heart. “What the fuck, Hargrove.”

Hargrove’s pale. That’s the first thing Steve notices. And then he takes in the narrowed eyes, the tightness of his jaw.

He says, “What’s wrong?” even though he’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to know. Junior’s okay, or Biro would have pinged him herself. She’s been bugging him constantly about names, and sending the birth paperwork through to SGC, and Steve’s been putting her off because Hargrove’s last suggestion had been Horatio, and Steve keeps accidentally calling him _Liam_ , and there’s no way in hell he’s naming the kid after Hargrove. He’d never hear the end of it.

“What were you thinking?” Hargrove says, voice just above a growl. No one in a lab coat should look that menacing.

“Uh.” Steve briefly thinks about fleeing back out the door, but this is _his_ room, Hargrove’s not going to run him off.

“Obviously,” Hargrove goes on, running hands through his curls and relaxing his stance only _very minutely,_ “obviously, you _weren’t.”_

“Now, hang on--”

“Because if you were,” Hargrove talks over him, “if you had been, you would have realized that dropping into a hole in the middle of the desert by yourself, where there could have been _replicators--”_

“Why were you even talking to Dustin?”

“You could have died, Steve!”

Steve has never before heard that level of… _strident_ in Hargrove’s tone. It’s the only reason he doesn’t yell right back at him. Instead, he says, tentatively, “Are you… were you worried about me?”

Steve could, technically, die almost every single day, even without going off-world. Atlantis is a cool city, sure, but it’s also chock full of Ancient tech that they haven’t fully figured out yet. They’ve had quarantines, the stupid _narflap,_ ghost possession, full scale genii assaults… they’re in the middle of unknown space; yeah, they might die. Hargrove already knows all this, though.

“If you die,” Hargrove says, “who’s going to take care of Junior?”

At first, Steve is sure Hargrove’s joking. He doesn’t laugh, though, because it’s not actually funny. But Hargrove’s tight expression doesn’t change, and Steve says, “You’re serious.” He says, “I thought--that’s the reason we’re on different teams, Hargrove! I’m not going to stop doing my job--”

“You could be a little more cautious,” he says, and Steve says, “You’re his dad, too!”

The silence after that is _loud._

Hargrove still looks mad.

Steve says, “I mean. You want to be his dad, right?” and feels immediately stupid about it.

Hargrove’s arms cross, but he looks more petulant than angry now. He says, “I’m not going to be good at it.”

Steve could say a lot of things here. He could say: _yeah, I can see that._ Even though it’s not true. He could also lie and say he’s going to be great, because who the fuck knows how to be a dad until they actually are one?

Once, not too long ago, Max got really drunk and tried to explain Billy; tried to show all his _nuances,_ things maybe only a little sister can appreciate. Max told them she’d hated him growing up, that she’d hoped he would fuck up and die more than once. She’d said that everything seemed like the end of the world at age thirteen, and that Billy never really got to be a kid. It was a bunch of cryptic, drunk ramblings, a bunch of bullshit, Steve had thought, but Hargrove’s here now, staring fixedly at the frankly uninteresting carpet, and _he doesn’t think he’s going to be good at being Junior’s dad._

Steve has absolutely no idea how to reassure him here. He figures maybe they just need time to work it out. He swallows hard and says, “I think Biro’s going to just send in all the papers with ‘Junior’ on them if we don’t decide on a name soon.”

Hargrove glances up at him, incredulous.

Steve just grins. He can ignore shit like a champ. Hargrove’s just going to have to deal.

*

So it turns out… it turns out that having a six pound baby that he can actually carry around with him is _terrifying._

“What the fuck,” he murmurs softly to himself, trying to figure out how much swaddling is too much swaddling. Biro still has him sleeping in the infirmary, but they can rock him and bottle feed him and look into his too blue eyes on the odd occasion that he’s awake. He’s like a tiny, squirmy doll that poops and cries loud enough that Steve figures they don’t have to worry about his lungs anymore.

He knows for a fact that Hargrove hasn’t held him yet.

They don’t talk about it, though. Just like they don’t talk about the fact that when one of them isn’t sleeping there, in the infirmary with Junior, they’re sleeping together.

It’s not like it happens all the time, mainly because Steve is _almost always_ sleeping in the infirmary with Junior. But on the rare occasion that Biro makes him sleep in a ‘real bed,’ he finds his way unerringly to Hargrove’s door, and Hargrove never seems to mind enough to kick him out.

It’s not a great habit, Steve thinks, but if he goes back to his own room all he’ll do is worry about the baby, and not actually sleep. He’d gotten used to having a warm body snuggled up next to him, during those last weeks of his pregnancy, and if Hargrove isn’t going to mention how weird it is, then Steve totally isn’t going to care.

Biro shoos him out of the infirmary at two a.m., pulling her robe ties tight around her waist and then yawning into a fist. She says, “I’ll feed him and he’ll be down for an hour or two, and maybe you’ll be awake enough to see off Dr. Hargrove in the morning.”

“Oh,” Steve says, reluctant to give up Junior, “I don’t need to--” He cuts off as she deftly scoops the baby and all his blankets out of Steve’s arms, one eyebrow arched knowingly at him.

“You mope. You both mope, in fact, so this way you won’t miss kissing him goodbye.”

Steve’s bright red, he can feel it. “We don’t…” he trails off, unsure of how to tell her it’s not like that. He’s never figured out how much she actually knows about them, but he realizes the whole sleeping together thing makes any protest kind of moot.

When he gets to Hargrove’s room, he doesn’t bother knocking. He slips inside, toes off his shoes. Shrugs off the zip-up hoodie he’d been wearing. Jesus, he’s pretty sure it’s Hargrove’s, anyway.

He’s down to a stretched-out t-shirt and boxers when he gets to Hargrove’s bed--still too narrow for both their bodies. When the bed dips under the weight of his knee, Hargrove shifts with a groan. He makes a sliver of room, holding up the blankets for him, and mumbles, “S’anything wrong with Aragorn?”

“No,” Steve says to both the question and the name, too tired to be disgruntled. He burrows into the bed, scoots back until Hargrove takes the hint and pulls him closer with an arm over his waist. “You do that on purpose.”

“Do what?” Hargrove says, but Steve can feel him smiling against the join of his shoulder. His breath is warm and his hand flattens out along Steve’s belly, right above the thin, whitening scar, and Steve’s suddenly much more awake.

He’s conscious of how close they are, and of how Steve hasn’t had sex since… since the last time they had sex. He doesn’t know if he should feel awkward, but Hargrove certainly doesn’t; he _hmmms,_ noses the worn neck of his tee out of the way, and moves to suck an open-mouthed kiss at the top of Steve’s spine.

Steve’s gotten three or four catnaps in the past forty eight hours. Hargrove has to get up early for a week-long mission. And those are just the very _practical_ reasons for why this is a bad idea.

“Hargrove.”

Hargrove _hmmms_ again. Steve feels teeth, and shivers.

“Are you even awake?” Steve asks.

Hargrove’s hand slips lower on his belly, fingers worrying the elastic band of Steve’s boxers. He says, “Enough,” and crowds his hips in closer, the fattening length of his dick pointedly pressing against Steve’s ass.

Steve’s eyes are gritty from exhaustion. He’s not actually sure when he last showered. It could have been days ago. Has he eaten anything lately?

Still, he’s half hard and Hargrove’s mouth doesn’t let up, so he just kind of _sighs_ when Hargrove manages to tuck his boxers down, band cutting into the tops of his thighs.

Hargrove’s already naked. It’s honestly not a surprise.

Steve squirms a little, not sure if he wants to shift backward, or hump into the loose cup of Hargrove’s hand on his cock.

And then Hargrove’s grip abruptly tightens and Steve rocks forward with a high whine as Hargrove laughs softly and _hushes him._

“You suck,” Steve says, panting when Hargrove’s fingers go light again, thumb swiping teasingly at the tip.

Hargrove says, “I could,” but urges him over, brings a knee up between his legs to pin and pull at Steve’s boxes, hand moving off his dick to palm both on Steve’s ass.

He’s leveraged behind and above him now, and Steve’s not sure he has enough energy for this, but he definitely wants to get off now.

Hargrove just hitches his hips up, though, slots his cock into the crease of his ass. He groans and says, “D’you mind, princess?” and Steve _doesn’t,_ just so long as Hargrove doesn’t expect him to be able to hold his weight.

His arms are noodles after sleepless hours of holding Junior up against his chest in the least comfortable rocker ever.

Dry humping, or _frottage,_ Hargrove says on a snort-laugh, is excruciatingly slow, but Steve can’t complain, not when Hargrove gets both his arms around him, eases him down with a pillow under his hips before he grips him again, hand slick with spit and precome now, and starts jerking him off in time with his slow sliding thrusts, letting Steve rut into the softness under them. They’re going to make a mess. There’s a ninety percent chance Hargrove’s going to make him _sleep_ in the mess, afterwards, but he can’t seem to make himself care.

Hargrove’s _unhurried,_ even though Steve can feel every expanding breath against his back, the sprawling moans, and Steve’s orgasm sneaks up on him, spills out so sudden he has to bite the covers to stop a shout, tries to still his jerking hips even as Hargrove chuckles, says, “ _There_ you go,” before biting at his shoulder and coming all over his back.

Long, slow moments later, he slumps off him to the side.

Steve’s shirt is sticky. He tries to work his arms up to pull it off, gets tangled, and then lets Hargrove help him before kicking the dirty pillow onto the floor.

Hargrove maneuvers them so Steve’s got his face tucked into his throat, blanket pulled up to their hips. He’s sweaty and smells like soap and Steve says, “This better not be awkward tomorrow.”

*

In the morning, Steve shifts over into the warm spot Hargrove leaves and yawns halfway through, “You have to go?”

He blinks his eyes open when Hargrove leans over him, grinning. He’s got his uniform shirt unbuttoned over a gray tank. He says, “Yeah,” and busses his cheek.

“What are you, my cousin?” Steve murmurs, and grabs for his shirt to tug him back down into a proper kiss. He doesn’t even think about it until he’s got his tongue in Hargrove’s mouth--doesn’t think that this isn’t something they do--and he’s only got a split second to panic before Hargrove groans and shoves his hands in Steve’s hair and pulls him in deeper.

The barely coherent part of Steve’s sleep-deprived brain is even less coherent when Hargrove moves back, breathes light and thready along Steve’s jaw.

“Tell Ponyboy to stay gold for me,” he whispers, and then dances away, laughing, when Steve throws a pillow at him and shouts, “Absolutely not!”

*

Hargrove’s gone for longer than a week.

At first, Steve doesn’t even really notice. Junior’s starting to cry all the time, and his feeding schedule is insane, and eventually Biro ropes Max, Robin, and Will into helping, so Steve’s brain can actually start functioning again.

It’s the middle of the cold harvest season for at least five neighboring planets, so Atlantis seems almost deserted. The Daedalus is set to bring extra troops in, but she’s still five days out. Steve’s team isn’t participating because he doesn’t want to spend the long hours away from Junior, and Sheppard’s still awkward enough about the situation that he let him get away with saying no.

So when a week turns into a week and four days, Steve’s gotten a semi-desirable amount of sleep, the halls are too quiet, and he realizes it’s been an awful long time since he’s seen Billy.

The only reason Steve isn’t panicking yet is because Hargrove’s team hasn’t missed a check-in. Their ID comes through the ‘gate like clockwork every day, twice a day. Gate Tech Kevin confirms it’s Perkin’s voice on the, “Everything’s copacetic,” she radios over every other morning.

Steve’s anxious, but he’s not worried.

Not until an unscheduled off-world activation spits Corporal Carol Perkins out onto the gangway, covered in dirt and scratches and blood from playing cat and mouse with a bunch of natives for almost two weeks.

Steve thinks, oh god, if Hargrove dies, he’s in this alone. Or, no. No, he’s not dumb, he’s not in this alone--he’s got Max and Dustin and Robin and Will and everyone else. It’s just. Shit. He wouldn’t be doing this with _Hargrove,_ and that’s just… unacceptable.

In a quick and dirty briefing in the infirmary, Perkins says they’d recorded her voice, that nothing’s been fine since the third day; that they’d taken Tommy and Hargrove, and that Holloway’s disappeared.

“They’re hiding how much tech they have. It’s a goddamn shitshow,” she says, dark circles of exhaustion under her eyes. She grabs Steve’s hand and says, “You shouldn’t go.”

“Oh, I’m going,” Steve says. There’s really nobody else--they’re too short-handed for him to worry about them both not coming back.

He leaves Junior in Biro’s capable hands--Max is going to have to worry about what-if’s, he doesn’t have time to feel bad about it--and goes off to find Robin.

*

Carol had slipped free under cover of darkness and sheer dumb luck, so Steve’s hoping for a bit of the same when they activate the ‘gate a little over two hours later.

It’s nighttime, but there’s a moon so close to the horizon it almost acts like a sun. That’s good, though. That’s good for hiding, because they won’t have to use flashlights, and everyone will already be used to moving shadows. You don’t usually suspect what you can see everyday.

They follow Perkins’s directions through patches of tall trees and rough terrain; the planet’s hilly, but not mountainous. They find the city approximately three klicks from the ‘gate, rising up out of a shallow basin of a valley. Roughly hewn, boxy buildings make the place seem more primitive than it apparently is. Hagan and Hargrove could be held in any one of them.

El scans the streets for five, seemingly interminable minutes, and then points. “That one. Tommy’s on the second floor. Billy’s underground.” She cocks her head eerily, says through gritted teeth, “Tommy’s being interrogated.”

“Oh fun,” Robin says. “El gets that one.”

It’s one thing to be sacrificial wraith worshippers to save your own skin--not a _nice_ thing, but understandable, considering, yes, it’s definitely their fault the wraith are even awake and feeding right now--and another to try and torture out Atlantis’s location. Steve really fucking hates that.

“I’ll get Hargrove,” Steve says. “You two hold off as long as you can. I’ll let you know when I’m out, so you can fuck anyone up who’s with Hagan. I’d rather get Billy out before they even know we’re here.”

El rubs the side of her hand under her nose. “Okay.”

Robin says, “Ten minutes. Unless they’re killing him.”

“Five minutes,” El says.

“You don’t even _like_ Tommy,” Robin points out.

El wavers, gives Robin a squinty-eyed look, then says, “Seven minutes.”

“Seven minutes,” Steve echoes, and then they slink down the edges of town.

*

It’s surprisingly easy to get down to the room they’re keeping Hargrove in, and Steve doesn’t want to think about what that means for Tommy. There’s a single guard that Steve takes out with barely a struggle and a knife to his neck. He’d feel bad about it, but he’s really not in the mood.

In the room, Hargrove’s slumped with his hands tied behind his back, curled into a corner. He’s shirtless, dripping blood from shallow cuts and lashes, and Steve has to swallow down his burning rage before he ends up radioing El to raze the entire city. He takes shallow breaths through his mouth--the stench is awful--as he moves toward him, drops to his knees and carefully skims a hand down Hargrove’s arm.

Hargrove jerks, then hisses, then nearly bends in half with a groan.

Steve says, “Careful.”

“Steve?” Hargrove’s voice is hushed and hoarse, threaded with confusion. “What’re you doing here?”

“Trying to save your asses,” Steve says, using his knife to work on the binds on his wrists.

“There’s a… there’s a _reason_ we’re on different missions now,” Hargrove says. “Who’s gonna take care of little Harry if we don’t come home?”

“Fuck you, Billy, we’re not naming him that.” The thick rope frays quickly as Steve saws into it. His hand jerks when he gets through the last of it, nearly cutting his thumb. “Shit.”

Hargrove’s grinning at him now, though, rubbing at his wrists, twisting around to look at him with suspiciously bleary eyes. “You called me Billy again.”

“Did you hit your head?” It’s a valid concern, now that Steve can tell he’s kind of slurring his words. There’s a cut along the top of his cheek, still fresh, and Steve gingerly hovers a hand over it before dropping it to curl over his forearm instead.

“Are you going to divorce my sister?”

“Are you _drugged?”_ His pupil size seems to suggest it.

“Hmmm,” Hargrove says, all noodle arms and legs when Steve hefts him up to his feet. “Gilbert?”

“No,” Steve says, and Hargrove is just as heavy as all his muscles suggest.

“He looks like a Poseidon, doesn’t he?”

“Keep your voice down.” He’s not sure how he’s going to get Hargrove up the narrow set of basement stairs if he can’t hold his own weight. “What is it with you and movie characters?”

“I read the books, Steven,” Hargrove says, somehow managing to look unimpressed while drugged up to his eyeballs. “Why don’t my feet work?”

“Because I’m being punished by god,” Steve murmurs. He’d carry him, but he doesn’t think he’d make it very far.

“Please tell me,” Hargrove says, slinging an arm around Steve’s shoulders and finally managing an extremely unsteady walk, “that you know who Poseidon is?”

“Someone we’re not naming our son after.” Steve doesn’t care who the fuck Poseidon is. He cares about what he’s pretty sure are several oozing infections along Hargrove’s back; the ones that aren’t bleeding are dangerously red. “Do you know where Holloway is?”

“Saw Tommy at a feast, man.” He’s clutching at Steve’s ballistic vest like it’s the only thing keeping him upright. “Carol. Carol…”

“Perkins went to get help,” Steve prompts.

“Right.” Hargrove coughs, shakes his head a little, like he’s trying to clear the fuzz off his brain. He seems to get better control of his limbs with each lurching step up the stairs.

“Holloway. Heather said she was, uh. Gonna fuck with their beacon. They’ve got a fucking wraith c’mere… thing… Steve,” he says, straightening up with sudden alarm, wheeling so Steve has to grab for his waist to keep him from falling backward, “we gotta get out of here. What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Saving you,” Steve says again, looking directly into Hargrove’s face.

Hargrove blinks. “Oh fuck.”

“What?” Steve says, but he’s pulling Hargrove forward, searching for the best possible way out of the building without getting seen.

“Fuck,” Hargrove says again, _with feeling._ He’s grasping onto Steve’s back, but he’s taking even more of his weight than he was before. “We’re in love with each other.”

Steve swallows down a panicked laugh, refuses to glance back at him. The door is as blessedly silent as when he’d slipped in, and if they stick to the trees, if Hargrove’s actually able to move, they may make it.

“You didn’t come alone, did you?” Hargrove asks, because apparently he thinks the best place for conversation is in the bright moonlight and the shadow-lined… Steve hesitates to use the word ‘street.’

Steve pushes Hargrove with his whole body, maneuvers him under the canopy of some thick-trunked, leafy tree, and says, “No, I didn’t come alone. Robin’s here. And Eleven.”

“Oh well,” Hargrove grins sloppily at him. “I’m sure we’ll all make it out of here alive.”

“Are you being _sarcastic_ right now?” Steve says, incredulous.

“Hell no. Eleven can explode stuff with her mind.” He squints. “You knew that, right?”

Steve sighs. “Can we talk about this later?” he says, then whistles, three long sounds, and waits for Robin to whistle back.

*

Eleven manages to destroy a third of the city getting Tommy out. Steve’s sort of disappointed; he wanted to see the whole place burn.

Plus, what townies are left spill out onto the street, armed to the teeth and shouting, but by then Hargrove’s moving under his own steam, and Steve helps Robin with a nearly unconscious Tommy.

El’s got blood all over her face. She radiates satisfaction, even as some sort of laser fire flies by their heads, exploding the rock around them. Sometimes, Steve really hates this galaxy.

And then Dr. Heather Holloway, esteemed geological engineer, appears out of nowhere in the near-dark, swings her P-90 up, and holds coverfire for them as they rush the last few yards to the DHD.

She yells, “What took you so long?” and takes at least five natives out at the knees.

Steve’s impressed, and a little scared.

Unlike Perkin’s harried and exhausted state, Holloway looks invigorated, with strategically streaked mud on her face and hands, and rope netting laced with dead leaves and twigs and brush draped over her shoulders and back like a cape.

She says, “They kept Tommy and Billy separate, so I wasn’t sure how to get one out without putting the other one in more danger,” grinning like a lunatic, “but I tried to keep them away from Carol as much as I could without getting caught.”

Hargrove actually hugs her as Robin dials into Atlantis. Steve knows it’s mostly friendly, despite Hargrove’s hand on her ass, and he knows it’s because of the drugs-- _hopes_ it’s because of the drugs. But it’s the first time Steve’s come face-to-face with the fact that Hargrove… sleeps around. That he’s always been sort of indiscriminate with his affections. And there’s absolutely nothing _wrong_ with that, except Steve’s been thinking things like ‘love’ and ‘baby’ and ‘family’ lately, and he can’t just assume that Hargrove’s on the same page.

They’re gonna have to talk about this. They’re gonna have to talk about what Hargrove thinks when he’s not high as a kite, and possibly feverish from infection.

Fuck.

*

Hagan, Hargrove and Holloway all end up in the infirmary alongside Carol. Tommy with a broken arm, three broken fingers, and several deep wounds that needed stitching. Billy with a dislocated shoulder and a particularly nasty infected slice along his side that had to be lanced and drained.

Holloway, wired from, apparently, subsisting on too many planet-native berries that acted like caffeine, had to be sedated, placed on an IV to clear out her system, and hooked up to a heart monitor for a mild arrhythmia.

Other than that, though, they’re left relatively unscathed for the amount of days they’d been trapped off-world.

It’s a relief, even as Hargrove’s pumped full of antibiotics and unconscious.

Pulling a chair up beside his cot, Steve’s hand hovers indecisively over Hargrove’s limp one on the blankets. Steve curls his fingers over his palm and then opens them up again, sighs loudly, and settles for holding onto Billy’s wrist. There’s a strong pulse at the base of his thumb, and Steve finds it stupidly reassuring.

He’s in sweatpants and a t-shirt he sleeps in, and his hair’s still wet from the hasty shower he’d taken. It’s been four hours since they got back. Seven hours since Carol showed up. Approximately… twenty hours? Since Steve last slept. His eyes feel gritty, but he doesn’t think he’ll be able to turn his brain off.

The steady beep of Holloway’s heart monitor, though, and the white noise Biro uses to soothe Junior, well--his head slowly tips sideways, and he’s out from one blink to the next.

*

“Hey.”

Steve jerks upright. “Fuck.” There’s a crick in his neck, a jabbing pain, and he thought his body was used to falling asleep in weird shapes already, but, “Ow.” He rubs at his neck and blearily looks over at Hargrove.

Billy’s face looks wary. Hesitant. He’s only seen Hargrove wary of three things before: Max, after the whole rage explosion at their Forced Alien Marriage; the narflap, when it’d been so close to finding them; and Junior, when Biro’d first held him out and said, “Here,” and Billy’d flinched away like he was bomb.

Steve is being generous here. Billy looks scared.

He says, “Are you alright?”

Hargrove tries to shrug, and then grits his teeth at the sudden jarring of his shoulder, like he’s unwilling to show pain. And then he says, “That was real stupid.”

Steve doesn’t realize he’s still holding onto Billy’s wrist until he lets him go. “ _Sure._ I guess I should’ve let you rot there?”

“There’s other people who could’ve come,” Hargrove says. “What if something happened to you?”

Steve scowls. “We’ve been over this. You don’t tell me how to do my job.”

“The kid _needs_ you,” Hargrove says, face red.

“He needs you, too, asshole,” Steve says, throwing up his hands. “ _I_ need you.”

Billy says, “What _the fuck_ do you need me for?” expression sullen, and Steve wants to punch him or shake him but he can’t do either. Biro would get mad.

Steve reaches for his hand, squeezes hard when Billy tries to pull away. He says, “Do you remember what you said to me?”

Hargrove looks like he wants to say _no,_ and Steve just squeezes even harder.

Steve’s chest is tight and his breath catches at the back of his throat but he makes himself say, “You remember. When you said we were in love,” and he makes sure it’s not a question. It feels like he’s underwater, like his heart is thundering in his ears. “I’m in love with you,” he says. “That’s what I need you for.”

“Holy shit!”

Steve closes his eyes, bows his head a little, and slowly counts to ten, embarrassment burning his cheeks.

“Holy _shit!”_

“Not now, Tommy,” Billy says.

“But!”

“Tommy. Shut up,” Billy says, louder.

Steve wants to melt into the floor. The infirmary is a terrible place for a love confession. Tommy’s _giggling._

Steve clears his throat and says, “Anyway,” and opens his eyes and looks anywhere but at Billy’s face. “You should get more rest. _I_ should get more rest. I should--”

“Steve.”

When Steve still doesn’t look at him, Billy’s hand wriggles and twists around in his--Steve hadn’t even realized his grip was still that tight--until he can thread their fingers together and squeeze back.

_“Steve,”_ he says.

His face is gray from exhaustion mixed with pain, but high on his cheeks are two bright spots of color. Steve doesn’t know if he’s embarrassed or pleased. If he’s happy, or if he just thinks Steve’s discomfort is _funny._

He just says, “Steve,” again, though, and, “I remember.”

*

The Daedalus brings in baby stuff that Steve never even thought to ask for: a bassinet, crib, more bottles, more formula, reusable diapers, colorful toys, _clothes._ Feeding gadgets, bowls and utensils, a high chair, a bouncer full of musical buttons, a walker with a toy phone attached. There’s literally a small mountain of stuffed animals. Box after box gets stacked in the hallway outside his room, and he thinks about how nothing is ever going to fit, and that he’s going to have to requisition bigger quarters. He’s going to have to ask _Billy_ about finding bigger quarters. That’s so fucking weird.

He’s not sure Hargrove even wants to live with him, but Steve can’t see it shaking out any other way. He’s hopeful. It’s a strange feeling where Billy is concerned.

“How did they even know what to bring?” he asks Max as she helps him sort.

“Dustin and Will did research,” she says. “They’re fighting over who’s going to be the best uncle. Lucas thinks having Erica on your away team is an advantage. You’re going to have more babysitters than you can possibly handle.” She has a stack of spit rags in front of her nearly two feet tall; Steve thinks they went a little overboard.

There are also so many tiny onesies that he’s probably going to grow out of in less than a month. He folds them into a pile and says, “Do you want to get an alien divorce?”

“Sure,” Max says. “I mean, it doesn’t _matter,_ but I think Billy’d really be touched.” She winks at him.

They’re still over two years out from the warm harvest festival, but maybe Sheppard would let them make a special trip. All he’d have to do is hand him the baby.

“We’d have to find the goat, though,” Max reminds him. “Or _a_ goat. I’m not sure if that was specified.”

“Was it even a goat?” Steve’s been calling it a goat, because the universal translator called it a goat, but, honestly, it had too many legs.

Max has her red hair pulled back in a low ponytail. Her bangs are long enough now that she keeps huffing them out of her eyes. Her cheeks are red and her chin is peeling after long hours spent mapping their nearest planetary neighbor last week--she’s their lone cartographer, even though she’s, technically, a doctor of mathematics and a trained astronaut.

He’s never been entirely clear on how he got roped into marrying her; on _good_ days she’s still mildly intimidating.

The way she’s looking at him makes him think she’s gearing up for something terrible.

It feels dangerously like she wants to have a heart to heart, and Steve finds himself wishing they weren’t quite so alone.

Steve says, before he can stop himself, “Oh god, you’re not going to give me the shovel talk are you? Can we skip that? I mean,” he sweeps a hand all over the place, “I’m the mom of your baby nephew!”

Max snorts a laugh. “You gotta stop calling yourself the mom.”

“I bore a son,” Steve says, warming up to it, and the smile on Max’s face. He’s seen Max threaten people multiple times--it isn’t pretty.

“Okay, okay.” Max holds up her hands, still laughing.

Steve gives her a look and thinks that’s the end of it, going back to folding even more clothes--t-shirts and tiny pants and _socks--_ but after a long, quiet moment she nudges their knees together and says, softly, “You’re good for each other. It’ll be okay.”

*

At eight pounds, the baby is a little armful with a swirl of dark hair. He’s got Billy’s mouth and the shape of his eyes is all Steve, even if they’re currently still a pale blue. The nose is a little iffy, mostly because he still kind of looks like a gremlin.

Billy looks up at Steve, clearly terrified but trying to hide it, elbows at awkward, stiff angles, and whispers, “Draco?”

Steve cups the side of his face, sweeps a thumb over the top of his cheek, and says, “There’s something wrong with you.”

Billy grins. He laughs and all his limbs relax. “Well, _somebody_ has to be the cool dad.” He’s cradling him closer to his chest now, more natural, and there’s awe and softness in his voice when he adds, “What are we really going to name him?”

Steve sighs heavily. He says, “Liam.”

_“Liam,”_ Billy echoes. “Liam Hor--”

“No.”

“--atio Hargrove-Harrington.”

“Harrington-Hargrove,” Steve says, and then, “That’s too many H’s.”

“It’s just the right amount of H’s,” Billy says, fond and soft and _loving._

It’s kind of weirding Steve out, to be honest, and also makes his chest burn and his throat dry.

Like he didn’t spend entire months avoiding holding him, Billy props Liam’s body against him with one big hand, kisses the top of his head where he’s curled up to his shoulder, a little fist stuffed close to his mouth, trying to suck.

Steve thinks, _this is so fucking weird,_ and, _I love you,_ and he’s terrified--absolutely scared shitless.

And then Billy throws him a cocky smile with warm eyes, and says, “We’ve got this,” and, _goddamn it,_ Steve can’t help but believe him.

Everything’s going to go wrong at some point, that’s a given.

They’re going to raise a kid in another galaxy filled with space vampires. This is, possibly, the stupidest thing he’s _ever_ gonna do. But whatever, they’ve got this. Accidental baby creation--not the strangest thing happening on Atlantis. They’re gonna be fine.

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes I write stuff on [tumblr](https://pantstomatch.tumblr.com).


End file.
